Deputy Editor tells journalists to talk to people!

Will Gore is Deputy Managing Editor of The Independent and the London Evening Standard. He “writes on a range of topics, including weekly columns about media ethics (having previously worked in press regulation).”

Four days after the “surprising result” of the British general election held on 8 June 2017, he penned an article in The Independent with the extraordinary headline

Why did journalists get it so wrong on the election? Even when they spoke to real people, they didn’t believe them

His concluding paragraph read

So here are some lessons many of us in the media need to learn. Don’t trust polls; don’t make assumptions; don’t believe party apparatchiks know something no one else does. Most importantly, get out and talk to real people – and then believe what they are saying.

Well, yes – as we pointed out last year in our piece Presidents and Prostitutes, it’s called doing the job properly.

 

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