They do not like it up em

Dear Media,

Please, get over yourself.

If you want to to play in the political sphere (as opposed to simply reporting it), then you have no right to whinge when someone starts to treat you just like any other political player.

If your editor is, say, going to call for the destruction of a political party, and your media organisation is going to run a consistantly negative line about said party, then you are going to have to expect the following:

• Said political party is not going to lie down and take it, they will call you out
• People are going to start questioning your ability to be objective
• Your credibility as a member of the Fourth Estate is going to take a hit

Now you could accept the above and move on, knowing full well that these are the natural consequences of diving into the political swamp, or you could splash about lobbing great steaming piles of prose and column inches in a vain effort to try and pretend that you still retain some sense of objective credibility.

Oh and one more thing, get used to the proles taking you to task in real time. Thanks to twitter and facebook, people can pull your dross apart quicker than you can blink and they're not going to stop. This will mean both that the debate will be live and that you are going to have to do a hell of a lot better when it comes to fact checking and subbing your news.

The media world is changing and if you lot don't evolve, someone else is going to replace you.