The Manchester Press corp and broadcasters "uniformed or timid"? I had to stand up for my journalistic colleagues. I emailed Peter and wrote...
 
 “I know columnists are paid to be controversial but your cheap shot at the media in Manchester over the death of Michael Todd was not only unprofessional and ill-informed it was symptomatic of the metro-centric media in the UK.

“When I joined the Daily Mail in 1977 in Manchester the office had 24 reporters. Now they have two. It's obvious London doesn't care about anything beyond the M25.

“If it did it would invest more in the regions.

“And as for investigative journalism, where were the London hacks when John Major was screwing Edwina Currie for four years? She managed to keep that particular exclusive for her book!”
 
After penning the mail...I began to ponder. The examples of London-centric thinking are numerous.

Helen Carter, who works for the Guardian in the North, tells a delightful story of the London news desk person who asked her to go to Northampton. When she pointed out it was nearer to London than Manchester the bemused hack complained "well, it has North in it...I assumed it was up your way."
 

The undercover affair

“Nobody would write in a national newspaper that Hackney is in north-west London or New York in the north-western United States.

“But the North of England is terra incognita: for many metropolitan types it is just what you see from the train between Scotland and civilisation.”

“It looked suspiciously as if that was the trouble with Jemima Lewis's copy last Saturday, when she was having fun with a story broken by my old paper, The Northern Echo - the discovery of a science-fiction based sex-slave cult in, of all places, Darlington.

“Lewis wrote of ‘the dispiriting contrast between ruling over the vast plains and mountains of Gor, and ruling over a pebbledashed terrace in North-west England’.

“When I lived in Darlington, it was definitely east of the Pennines.

“For someone like me, a Londoner born and bred, but with vivid and mostly fond memories of the 10 years of my youth spent working in the North-east, that sort of thing is desperately embarrassing, for it seems to confirm just exactly that combination of ignorance and condescension of which northerners habitually accuse the South.”
 
So there you have it...the Old "It's Grim Up Norf" syndrome.
 
But back to the key point, did journos really know of Todd's dangerous liaisons?

Dearsley

Best wishes, Peter McKay.”

I guess we'll probably never know.
 
George Dearsley is a director and senior tutor of media training consultancy Avante (www.avantemedia.co.uk). He has thirty years of journalistic experience, including working as northern correspondent on the Sunday Times and running The Sun’s northern night news desk.

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