Theresa May must rescue Britain’s press industry by stopping web giants from seizing our news
Pressing worry
FOR years the web giants have sucked the lifeblood from Britain’s news organisations. It has to stop.
We’re all for free markets and competition. But it’s not a fair fight.
Google and Facebook seize content, expensively produced by everyone from The Sun down to the smallest local paper, post it and take the advertising revenue. Meanwhile they spew out clickbait and fake news.
The result? Newspapers and their online arms are in sharp decline.
So we hugely welcome Theresa May announcing a Government review into what’s going wrong and how those of us paying to provide the content read by millions can be properly reimbursed.
The PM says the free Press is “a foundation on which our democracy is built” and she’s right. Who will hold politicians to account if we don’t?
Most news you read online originates with newspapers and their websites.
A future in which it is no longer viable to fund decent journalism, and pay reporters to ascertain the truth, is unthinkably dark.
Labour shame
GIVEN its recent record, it is jaw-dropping that Labour chose to turn yesterday’s 100-year anniversary of women getting the vote into an attack on the Tories.
Labour has never elected a woman leader. It is now a party run by militant old men whose bullying, sexist foot soldiers forced out their most senior woman in local politics only last week.
Its shadow chancellor “jokes” about lynching or assassinating Tory women.
Its thugs so terrified BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg that she needed a minder at its annual conference.
Its MP Jared O’Mara had to quit an equalities committee over his misogyny.
This is the party lecturing the Tories — who gave women the vote and later made two Prime Minister.
One of those, Theresa May, has championed the recruitment of women to politics her whole Westminster career.
She has nothing to learn about women’s rights from Corbyn or the partisan dimwits on his front bench.
Coward’s lair
IT’S hard not to sympathise with staff at Ecuador’s London embassy, condemned to endure yet more time with the odious fugitive, fantasist and coward Julian Assange.
It is a crying shame Sweden gave up on the rape allegation from which he fled. But, as a court here rightly confirmed yesterday, he is still wanted for jumping UK bail. And America still wants to extradite him.
Why should we refuse them? After all the millions our taxpayers have spent policing him round the clock since 2012, why should we do Assange any favours?
He is choosing to hide in his fetid lair. He should man up and face the music.