Dizzy on the failure of the fourth estate in Parliament

Dizzy thinks writes a damning critique of the Parliamentary lobby system which he believes is producing failures in the process of the fourth estate.

Asked by a Whitehall editor of one of the nationals why he as a blogger he manages to get and sustain scoops he replied

He asked me how I did it. H ow I managed to get original stories that his paper and other papers and broadcasters then picked up on ran with - a mainstream media hit as it were. When I told him that I read through the information published by Parliament daily each morning; scanned the departmental websites for freedom of information request responses; sent sporadic FoI's into departments asking questions that might elicit interesting answers and wrote my own little programmes that could pattern match other available information online, he was taken aback.

Were journos to blame for Smeargate?

The keys to the system are held by journalists. It is only through the collusion of journalists that underhand and anonymous attacks on political colleagues can have any effect.

writes Alice Miles in what is surely a controversial piece in the Times this morning.

For Alice the keys mentioned were the fact that concerning Damien McBride and his smear campaign,those keys were

We may not have known the detail of the nasty smears about senior Conservatives that Mr McBride was dreaming up, but we knew about the smears against his own side. We knew what he was up to, and we knew that he was being paid more than £100,000 a year of public money to do it – and we did nothing to stop it.

Time then to do away with the lobby system then