National daily newspapers are beginning to get on my nerves. It’s becoming increasingly fashionable for them to print leaked government documents before they are officially announced.
The latest example is a Whitehall paper “seen” by the Financial Times which outlines a vision of an employer-led expansion of higher education.
Apparently, because it isn’t official yet, government wants the bulk of future spending increases to go towards business-focused degrees: co-designed by employers; co-funded by employers; and served up according to a timetable that suits employers.
An interesting enough proposal I thought, so I called my “contact” at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (Dius), only to be told that it doesn’t speculate on leaked documents. Aargh, and you cal yourself a contact, I thought to myself. What does a journalist have to do to see a leaked document?
And, why is government so content to act as a colander for a handful of national titles and then provide foolish "no comment" statements when everyone has already been informed through the Times, Telegraph and just about every other broadsheet on the market?
I am starting to smell a rat here. My theory is that government is happy for the news to be leaked before they are officially allowed to expand on it, hoping that today’s news will be replaced by tomorrow’s news, which is actually the next days news, without much further investigation.
Perhaps the hope is that we continue to swallow our daily doses of Prozac, which doesn’t work anyway, as we try to play catch up with the world. And when the documents are actually released, they will quickly be dispatched to the recycling bin as old news with no further questions asked, because we are of course all keen to do our bit for the environment.
