View all newsletters
Sign up for our free email newsletters

Fighting for quality news media in the digital age.

Tony Blair: ‘We’ve got a problem with the UK media’

By Dominic Ponsford

On the eve Tony Blair’s star turn before the Iraq War Inquiry, he has echoed his feral beasts speech condemning British journalists in an interview with the Sunday Times.

He told the paper: ‘We’ve got a problem with the UK media. They don’t approach me in an objective way.

‘Their first question is how to belittle what I’m doing, knock it down, write something bad about it. It’s not right. It’s not journalism. They don’t get me and they’ve got a score to settle with me. But they are not going to settle it.”

Two weeks before he stepped down as Prime Minister in June 2007, Blair delivered a scathing attack on UK journalism standards in a speech made at Reuters.

He said that increased competition, and the need for the media to deliver more and more ‘impact’is ‘unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be but an impulsion towards sensation above all else”.

And famously he said: ‘The fear of missing out means today’s media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out.”

Speaking to the Sunday Times Blair said that he gets a better press abroad these days.

Content from our partners
MHP Group's 30 To Watch awards for young journalists open for entries
How PA Media is helping newspapers make the digital transition
Publishing on the open web is broken, how generative AI could help fix it

‘It’s not true that nobody likes me. Reading the papers in Britain, you’d end up thinking I’d lost three elections rather than won them. There is a completely different atmosphere around me outside the country.

‘People accept the work that you are doing, as it is. They don’t see anything wrong with being successful financially and also doing good work. If I did what these people who criticise me here wanted, I’d end up sitting in a corner, but that is never going to be me.”

Tony Blair is due to appear before the Iraq Inquiry early in the New Year. A date for his evidence has not yet been given.

Writing in Press Gazette in 2007, veteran Lobby correspondent David Rose explained some of the reasons why Blair may have made himself unpopular with journalists.

He said: ‘Blair’s legacy is tarnished not just by what is now widely perceived as his misjudgement in going to war in Iraq, but in misleading Parliament, the media and the public about the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein…

‘Under Blair, spinning has come so embedded in Government that journalists genuinely now have difficulty at times in knowing when they are being told the truth.”

Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog

Select and enter your email address Weekly insight into the big strategic issues affecting the future of the news industry. Essential reading for media leaders every Thursday. Your morning brew of news about the world of news from Press Gazette and elsewhere in the media. Sent at around 10am UK time. Our weekly does of strategic insight about the future of news media aimed at US readers. A fortnightly update from the front-line of news and advertising. Aimed at marketers and those involved in the advertising industry.
  • Business owner/co-owner
  • CEO
  • COO
  • CFO
  • CTO
  • Chairperson
  • Non-Exec Director
  • Other C-Suite
  • Managing Director
  • President/Partner
  • Senior Executive/SVP or Corporate VP or equivalent
  • Director or equivalent
  • Group or Senior Manager
  • Head of Department/Function
  • Manager
  • Non-manager
  • Retired
  • Other
Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications.
Thank you

Thanks for subscribing.

Websites in our network