A Citizen's Assembly to Restore Sanity in the World's Town Square

Russell Jones has an idea that might help regulate mainstream media's clickbaitery and the Wild West of social media.

Photo: Hayley Blackledge/Alamy

On 11 March 1702, a full 80 years after the Germans did it, Britain finally got around to publishing its first daily newspaper, The Daily Courant. It shouldn’t be remarkable, but this is the world we live in, so it is: the first editor was a woman, Elizabeth Mallet. She set up shop next door to a tavern on Fleet Street, and to this day British journalism is inseparably associated with that location. And with taverns.

Mallet built her paper around an admirable ethos: she announced she would not add any comments of her own to the news she reported, because she understood that her readers would have ‘sense enough to make reflections for themselves’, a belief that lasted a surprisingly long time: 40 days. And then The Daily Courant was bought out by the future publisher of The Spectator, who relocated it to a neighbourhood called Little Britain.

It's the satirists I feel sorry for.

Title pages of the c. 1788 edition of the collected edition of Addison and Steele's The Spectator. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As for making reflections for ourselves: three centuries later, The Spectator features nary a word that doesn’t mirror the output of the Conservative Central Office Reality Filter, and Britain has rarely felt Littler. Journalistic probity seems as anachronistic as powdered wigs and petticoats, and the industry is in permanent crisis, hollowed out by free-to-read clickbaitery and the Wild West of social media.

I blame myself. I blame you too, and Stephen Fry. Between us, we managed to kill off journalism’s business model. Back when Twitter was a place of gentle mischief and socially acceptable fun, we hurled ourselves gleefully into its arms, and in doing so accidentally nudged print media off a cliff.