Andrew Marr: UK press 'can learn from' miserable Iraq failure

The Sunday Herald reports that Andrew Marr, speaking in a Q&A session at the Edinburgh Book Festival spoke of the decline in British Journalism - and reasons for it - deftly avoiding the 'tipping point' that was the UK press's miserable performance concerning the build-up to the attack on Iraq - until Mr Tam Dalyell, in trade mark style, shined a light on the elephant in the room...

He was caught off guard by a question from Tam Dalyell, the former MP and the former leader of the House. Dalyell asked why journalists such as Marr had not bothered to question the veracity of the "Dodgy dossier", even though colleagues on the ground in Iraq, such as Robert Fisk and Patrick Cornwall, had already rubbished many of its claims. "It just never crossed my mind the dossier could be that ropey."

Marr admitted that most of the British press were prepared to suspend their disbelief and "collectively exaggerate" the terror threat - exactly the outcome the government had been hoping for in publishing the dossier, in February 2003.

It led to extraordinary headline such as The Sun's "Britain: 45 minutes from doom".

Marr admitted: "Most of us got over-excited [by that] and that is something that we can learn from." Read more

... Understatement of the century. No wonder we have all turned to the internet - where the volume of newsfeeds and alternative sources enables you to, at least partly, overcome the need for trust in overfed, lazy, spineless newspaper reporters. I like Andrew Marr, but he is no Seymour Hersh.