![]() ![]() Much of what Montgomerie wrote in the build-up to the launch is almost incomprehensible. While the voices it represents aren't really marginalised at all, the site also promises to be brilliantly crap. Now, he's giving four years of financial backing to a career Tory politico/editor to end the cruel silencing of the incredibly wealthy. He also co-edited The Orange Book, a free-market loving tome which is influential among the right-wing of the Lib Dems. The site is funded by Paul Marshall, founder of Marshall Wallace, one of Europe's largest hedge-funds. There's Douglas Murray, associate director of foreign policy think-tank the Henry Jackson Society, who's seemingly never short of a TV slot on which to promote his book, while voicing his opinion that "less Islam in general is obviously a good thing". There's former minister David Laws and former MP Angus Robertson. On Monday, the UnHerd had a piece by Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Tories, writing about another of the UnHerd's tragically marginalised themes – that capitalism is… good! Among the regular contributors is Ian Birrell, a contributing editor of the Mail on Sunday and weekly columnist in the i paper. The site that claims to be for unheard voices, while its contributors are a parade of people who already have big media profiles, or are think-tank directors with books out. It's this sense of the media's entitlement that can explain the UnHerd. On the other, the smug dismissal of people like Rupert Myers – the political correspondent for GQ, who looks like he's wearing a rubber face like Ryan Gosling at the end of Drive – who tweeted his condescension, missing the significance of the contempt with which people hold his profession, and how journalists were seen as part of an establishment they're supposed to hold to account. ![]() On the one hand, you had irresponsible conspiracy theorists being more sensationalist than any tabloid hack, using the vernacular of journalists while trashing the MSM to give more credibility to their own nonsense stories. Somewhere between the "D-Notice" episode and the editor of clickbait site The Canary appearing on Question Time, the antipathy between professional journalists and their social media detractors reached some kind of bitter zenith. Well now, we have the UnHeard being fairly explicit that they preferred a time when information was tightly controlled. Journalists felt smug – we'd never actually put up with that sort of censorship, and our professionalism had called out the idea as a joke. Media outlets queued up to do withering takedowns of the fake news. A "D-Notice", now called a DSMA-notice, is a non-binding agreement not to report things that would impact national security. The story was pushed by the kind of blogs which love nothing more than to drag the hated "MSM". This is a disconcerting echo of a fake rumour following the Grenfell Tower fire that there was a "D-notice" on the number of deaths. It's telling that the age of total war – where journalists waited to be told what they could and could not print by the Ministry of Information – is seen as a golden era. Tim Montgomerie, editor of The Unherd (Photo via Policy Exchange) Every month or so another journalist writes a profound Medium post either strongly defending or bleakly questioning the point of it all when a data robot can write a story for the Press Association, and a murder weapon can be rinsed for clicks. ![]() With the media industry in a bad way, there has been a lot of that going on recently. One of the holding site's first articles was about why former Tory Chancellor George Osborne's editorship of the London Evening Standard is actually a good thing. It's especially unfortunate when the theme of its launch is dedicated to the state of journalism, with a whole raft of content under the banner "Newsaholics Anonymous – our deep dive into the news industry". It's unfortunate for a new media venture to be bizarrely unable to articulate its intended audience. The UnHeard looks set to be another huge and epic contribution to British public life. Before that, he wrote speeches for William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, two failed Tory leaders. Previously he had edited ConservativeHome, the "grassroots" Tory comment website that has been owned by billionaire Michael Ashcroft since 2009. ![]() He still had a column, which he used to make a big huffy deal publicly when he quit the Conservative Party last year, to protest David Cameron wanting to stay in the EU. Editor Tim Montgomerie is a Thatcher fan-boy who became comment editor for Times in 2013 and lasted a year before resigning. ![]()
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