In a world exclusive, I can reveal that Huntingdon Constituency Labour Party uses Slack to stay in touch.
I presume this is newsworthy as Skwawkbox has run a couple of pieces [1, 2] about Lobby journalists using WhatsApp. Skwawkbox is trying to say that the Lobby is too cosy a set and is prone to groupthink. That is not an unreasonable position, and I talk below about how you could reasonably go about making the argument. What is unreasonable is the way that Skwawkbox makes its arguments. Fearless reader, accompany me up the garden path!
Skwawkbox’s first story starts with a post on Paul Staines’ Guido Fawkes blog that mentions, in passing, that ‘colleagues’ of Matt Chorley feel that he’s been on WhatsApp forever. This is Staines’ usual low-rent gossip. The story becomes bananas when Skwawkbox starts reading into ‘colleagues’ being in the post instead of ‘Times colleagues’. If it was just ‘Times colleagues’, hunky-dory; as it’s colleagues (and Skwawkbox doesn’t appear to even consider that Guido Fawkes may have meant ‘colleagues at Chorley’s newspaper’ by ‘colleagues’), we have to talk in hushed tones about conspiracy. Skwawkbox highlights that WhatsApp is more secure than email; again, it may just be that WhatsApp is convenient and they’re not thinking about security. They could also use PGP to encrypt their emails.
I want to re-iterate this; Skwawkbox is hanging the entire story on the absence of the world ‘Times’ in an aside on a post on the Guido Fawkes blog.
One possibility is that Lobby journalists are plotting on a secret channel to distort what the public sees so that their overlords can take over the world*. Another is that it’s a bloody WhatsApp group, and they’re using it because everyone uses it and it’s convenient. Their messages might be about taking over the world, or whether you want to go for a beer after work.
Skwawkbox then responds to the MSM response to their original article (helpfully not linking to what those MSM responses were). Scorn was poured on the article because it was a bad article. The second Skwawkbox article bothers me more than the first in no small part because of this line
So the people who were eager to scoff at a brief article with some actual evidence in it were more than happy to promote a story for which there is not only no evidence, but for whose complete fallacy there is ample.
What evidence in the original article? The absence of the word ‘Times’? The suggestion that there must be something nefarious about a group of people who work together using a group messaging system that, in no small part because of concerns after PRISM and so on, offers encryption by default? I don’t know whether the writer of the post has incredibly low standards for evidence or just doesn’t care, but it irks me that people will read this and think that Skwawkbox was making a potentially reasonable point in a reasonable way.
If you wanted to make the argument that the Lobby is too cosy, you’d look at the structure of the Lobby – only certain journalists gain its privileged access – and its function – Lobby journalists have to report without attribution, so may want to make themselves look more important than they are and inflate stories. You would look at stories written by Lobby correspondents to see if there is herding; you might look at how, say, the White House Press Pool works, or compare with other democracies. You might see what Lobby journalists themselves say (I think I heard Laura Kuenssberg talking about it on the Today programme not too long ago). That, though, would have required some time and effort; much easier for Skwawkbox to run a story (if I can paraphrase the Tempest) based on air, based on thin air. Skawkbox’s editorial line is that everything is a conspiracy, and so it must see conspiracy everywhere. As I said of the Canary,
It’s not just stupid, paranoid, yellow journalism; it’s badly-written, stupid, paranoid, yellow journalism
A final thought: lobby journalists have to publish their interests. I wonder if Steve Walker, who runs Skwawkbox, will do the same.
* or are reptiles. I’ve had people on my YouTube channel say I’m a reptilian because the coating on a pair of my glasses would flash green on camera.