Meet The Express Senior Political Correspondent
By Paul Homewood
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1873522/vicky-ford-electric-vehicles-pavement-tax
Yesterday’s article in the Express by Steph Spyro shows how low the British media has fallen.
Spyro now has the title “Environmental Editor” and “Senior Political Correspondent”, so you might assume she has years of experience in these matters.
Sadly not! In fact she has virtually no journalistic experience at all.
https://www.express.co.uk/journalist/123331/Steph-Spyro
According to her Linkedin page, she only started work at the Express four years ago, and she only left University in 2020:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephspyro/?originalSubdomain=uk
Her writings make it clear that she knows very little about the topics, and that most of what she thinks she knows is just propaganda that has been fed to her at school and university.
Where have all the real journalists gone?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“Where have all the real journalists gone?”
The same place as all the adults in the room.
The Express brand is owned by Reach plc which also publishes the Mirror rags. The online puff of this company runs in part:
“Our Purpose
To enlighten, empower and entertain through brilliant journalism…
Each of our trusted titles is a platform…
We’re proudly mainstream and believe in giving our audiences something to smile about*…”
So, no hubris there!
I notice that this young woman started work at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Therefore, almost all of her actual job experience is likely to have consisted of streams of email exchanges, interminable zoom conferences with like-minded, excitable, young things, and cut-and-paste forays into Google, all conducted in the stuffy confines of some dull apartment.
*This must be the clickbait bit.
Must be rare to have the words ‘enlighten’ and the ‘Express’ linked together.
‘Tweenie’ spings to mind.
Do they have a junior political correspondent I wonder?
waiting for her to get back from play school
Experienced writers are not cheap.
Yes they are, which is why they have all gone off to do other things. There’s no money at all in print journalism.
I just looked up “glassdoor” for an indication of journalists starting salaries. It is barely better than National Minimum Wage and nowhere near a graduate’s likely expectation for a vocational degree course. Considering postal delivery workers (can’t say “postman” anymore!) start at nearly £30,000 inclusive of delivery bonuses, journo’s pay is dismal.
To explain my sarcasm Phoenix44 — “Inexperienced writers are cheap”.
One thing life teaches you is that experience trumps enthusiasm, experience shows you that not all the answers are easy and achievable at the snap of your fingers, it usually involves failure and financial loss- always the hardest but most lasting experience. However, enthusiasm allows you to rush in, usually like a “bull in a China shop”, shouting and demanding that your solution is the only way, failure is not an option and if it fails, then obviously it was the morons who were asked/instructed to carry out the “simple” tasks that brought about failure, the solution was correct, the execution rubbish.
This journalist may with a few years experience suddenly realise that the World is just a bit more complex than University said it was, not everything works as ideally expected and above all else there is a restraining factor- how much will it cost and who is going to pay and how.
One thing you will recall from University days is that not one person actually understood a budget and how everything is limited by the budget, including your ability to borrow this year to pay back next year.
We have a massive black hole in our financial outlook, the National Debt hangs over us like the Sword of Damocles, the CCC have admitted that they deliberately underestimated the cost of Nett Zero, it could be £3trillion or £10trillion depending on what we do regarding the National Grid, either way it’s a bloody big number that will raise ugly questions with potential fund providers- how will a de-carbonised, de- industrialised Nation raise money when they have no desired export goods to provide an income while importing manufactured goods it cannot produce, food it cannot grow, lumber, bricks, blocks, roofing/wall & floor tiles, glass, insulation, steel it can no longer manufacture due to high energy costs crippled by intermittent supply.
Nett Zero will turn the Nation into paupers desperate for foreign aid.
“One thing you will recall from University days…”
Ah, yes. Those were the days. I often share John Major’s reminiscences of our time being ‘up’ as they say. One day I expect to graduate – if ever the learning stops.
Exports do not “provide an income”. There is no difference between me selling domestically or selling abroad – my revenue as a business is identical. And it’s businesses that export, not countries. Now think of the world as a whole – there’s nobody to export to (yet). So exports cannot be some sort of “income” that’s different. As Adam Smith said “Nothing can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade, upon which, not only these restraints, but almost all the other regulations of commerce are founded.”
A very fine, if rather depressingly correct summary of UK plc – and quite a few other too….
Ask Sri Lanka how destroying your export income worked out when it comes to paying for imports.
At some point in the past the government gave up issuing the Balance of Trade figures. As I recall they were discussed in detail on the radio news every month and in months when there was a big deficit the value of the pound was affected.
There was always “invisible earnings” to fall back on. Financial services, tourism and the like.
The other forgotten metrics were Gold and Convertible Currency reserves. Again discussed on the BBC News in great detail.
Then there was the infamous “pound in your pocket” devaluation and “crisis what crisis” financial crises when Labour Governments mismanaged the economy.
You don’t have to make stuff to become a wealthy nation but having something that other countries want, energy for example, is a necessity.
The Express confesses that they are propaganda, not news.
highlights the media’s role in shaping the public’s opinion on these topics
Why inform when you can shape?
Diversity in action?
In the Express? Seriously?
The important thing is that she is young enough that she will still be of working age in 25 years — much wiser — and able to report on the great seduction of the ClimateCult™. I will have checked out before this happens so I hope another reader will gently remind her of her younger self.
I doubt it – despite the collapse of the USSR and the obvious failure of Socialism, most socialist journalists have carried on, arguing endlessly that it wasn’t the fault of socialism…
Yep, socialism works perfectly – well, it will do when it is done properly without being sabotaged by the CIA, USA, aliens, etc.
How we miss the great Christopher Booker
Who’s the Express junior political correspondent. An A level student?
Can she read a graph? Does she understand hard sums? Can she differentiate between +ve and -ve?
“In fact she has virtually no journalistic experience”
4 years is some experience
I imagine she is no longer naive
but cynically pushes Green PR