Britons - this is your reminder that Private Eye is available for subscription at the very low price of £45 for an issue in your letterbox fortnightly.
Once they've mailed out the magazine they can't delete a story, no matter what - and if someone doesn't like the content? Two weeks later it's disappeared from news stands.
Newspapers that rely too heavily on advert revenue also often have conflicts of interest (which you'd know about, if you were reading the Eye) so I suspect they like having enough subscriber income that they only need to sell ads for wool sweaters and reading lights - advertisers who are unlikely to want a story spiked.
A recent example is the story that an MP walked in on Carrie blowing Boris in his office as Foreign Secretary while he was still married to another woman, and that at the time he was also trying to get her a paid job in his office.
The Times had that story and printed most of it (though referred only to a 'comprimising situation') in their early edition of the paper the next day but it vanished from the later prints which end up in newsagents. The Mail also had the story online for a couple of hours before deleting it.
Private Eye printed the whole saga including the gory detail and the article getting spiked.
You might say this is just lurid gossip but as a taxpayer I would like to know if our leaders are giving paid jobs in government to women who blow them on the side, and I won't find out about it from any newspapers.
(The cartoons are pretty funny too!)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2010/feb/05/pri...
He may have been smitten by Heather Mills who was the journalistic driving force behind that crusade.
FWiW when I see Private Eye I still think Peter Cook.
> ... when we wrote about the concerns of Wakefield
This really undersells the situation, it suggests he was just a concerned doctor who innocently pursued a theory that turned out to be wrong. You're likely aware of how it went down but for everyone else: Wakefield completely fabricated some evidence to raise fears that a combined measles/mumps/rubella vaccine was causing autism via some hitherto unknown gastro-intestinal disease (giving some pretty invasive and unnecessary procedures on kids in the process) with the intent of profiting from a vaccine of his own. He was struck off and prevented from practicing medicine in the UK (still active in the USA) but the damage had been done and he basically laid the groundwork for modern day antivax movement.
This doesn't discredit Private Eye altogether, of course. It's just a bit annoying that they have this. A reminder, perhaps, that nobody's perfect?
I’m not a massive fan of Politics JOE but I enjoyed this interview with Eye editor Ian Hislop, which I think is a good overview of his attitudes and politics https://youtu.be/IbXQWqZ2RvA
That said, part of the great value I get from Private Eye is seeing things unfold over multiple issues or even multiple years as is the case of the Post Office/Fujitsu thing.
Its a great souce for stories of wrong doing in national and local government, business, schools, the NHS, transport, farming and the Media. They regularly report on miscarriages of justice which you'll never usually hear about and get to the root of certain stories that are only very superficially reported on nationally.
Its also a fantastic source of scurrilous gossip and rumour about politics and media which is usually accurate. They've been doing it for years now, since the early 1960's.
Still waiting to hear why a certain young person (of very modest accomplishments) made it into the House of Lords. Given the absence of any reporting by PE on this, it seems that rumours of a 'super injunction' might be true.