Meet Dr Rebecca Whittington the Online Safety Chief for Reach PLC. Her job "to support journalists across the company who receive abuse or harassment as a result of their job".
The reality of journo abuse is that a lot of it is very similar to the abuse journos hand out, it may not be the journos that hand it out who receive it but let's remember Jeremy Clarkson is a journo, Kelvin MacKenzie is a journo, Piers Morgan is a journo formerly at Reach, the people who work at GBNews are journos. They are the big names in journo abuse. Who is there to protect the people who are their victims?
True, most of them pick on big names, who have the budgets for therapy and security but what about further down the list where the local and regional press abuse people? I have suffered abusive phone calls from the rag that is the Echo and its then editor. I also suffered attacks on Twitter when mentioning it, from Reach's staff. Where is my support?
Where is Helen Wilkie's support after being forced off a course by the Liverpool Echo's editor for alleged abuse on Twitter? Have those abusive tweets been produced yet? Last time I checked they hadn't!
Where is the support for the people of Upper Pitt Street where a flat was attacked and smashed up, incurring £1000s of pounds worth of damage for the landlord to pay, because the Echo revealed that someone just convicted of sexual offences had lived there? Of course, as they'd been held on remand and were sent down for 4 years, were never going to live there again. What public interest was there in publishing this detail other than to prime the mob?
The Echo likes a good crime story, the darker the events the better, they play well with the prurient interests of the readers and sells papers thereby making them money. What also makes money is a hagiography of murdered gangsters or the death of some petty hoodlum. Oh, they loved their mum.
Whatever gets the most clicks or sells the most papers.
Journalists have granted themselves special privileges in society and they are cuddled up to the powerful. You or I engaging in the practices that journalists engage in, is 90% of what they call abuse when it's directed at them.
If there is some deal where we tolerate their, for money, intrusion in people's lives, in return for them keeping a close eye on those in power and holding them accountable, then we seriously need to revise it because they stopped delivering on their side of the bargain long ago.
The rise of media away from the likes of Reach is a threat to them, that's why Reach took Google's money to try and destroy truly local journalism.
I'm sure that a large focus of her job will be humanising journalists to the population, so people feel sympathy for them. It is a job Reach will only do for its staff and the most socially destructive criminals on its patch.
Of course Whittington doesn't allow people to comment on her posts, how typical of journalists. Hypocritical to the core.
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