Then I think we are in agreement.

The response lies in localised media as in LNMF, of that I am increasingly certain, based on limited local evidence. People genuinely like an alternative view. The left can’t take them on nationally for a bit.

There’s no journalist who deserves to be paid the sort of salary which ‘star commentators’ earn, and I suspect that it boils down to the death of the printing and journalist unions.

Money starved from the newspaper floor, where people’s wingnuttery is curtailed by having to co-exist with other people, is going to commentators who have to do nothing by develop a keen sense of keyboard rage and a relationship only with the nuttiest of ideas bouncing around online, ideas that would never receive grounding if forced to exist socially, passed on face to face.

But I’m increasingly agreeing with Sunny Hundal that it’s a worying potent; a possible harbinger of the British rightwing media emulating the American.

Certainly, the threat of this will become considerably worse if Murdoch get’s his way and can turn Sky News into Fox UK.