Two points…

1) This forum is a self-selecting sample and can hardly be held up as a statisically valid cross-section of the UK newspaper-reading public.

2) Who read the muck? Well, it was regularly shifting in excess of 2.5 million copies a week at a time of declining newspaper circulation so clearly quite a lot of people were reading it.

Or looking at the pictures, at least. 😉

So, nJayM, what’s your idea of the way forward?

Bearing in mind, of course, that things staying just as they are is not an option

Perhaps they were “irrelevant”, like Mr Cameron’s meetings with Newscorp about their BSkyB bid? :diablo:

I’ll bet we won’t see that in Luton. :diablo:

It may well be that there are too many powerfully-entrenched vested interests in play to permit the formulation of the kind of rational long-term policy that you and I would like to see.

Quite so.

Maybe, as a nation, we get the press we deserve.

I doubt whether an arch-exponent of market forces like Murdoch Senior (who is a “born-again” Christian, apparently) would permit his media companies to mass-produce the salacious lowest common-denominator tripe that they do unless there was a large enough customer base for it.

No renewable energy source can provide the answer to all of our energy needs, and each has disadvantages – some of them serious.

But the status quo is not a viable option for the medium and long term either.

I don’t know why you have to be nasty…

I’m not a moderator any more, Mr B.

So long as I respect the Code of Conduct, I don’t have to be nice to you.