When did reporters stop reporting the news and become political propagandists instead?

We are not just talking about the tabloids here – although much more about them later – but about local newspapers, the regional backbone of the free press of which we were rightly proud.

Local newspapers, which once reported on court proceedings and held councils to account, have shed hundreds of journalists over the past few years. These journalists were not only the victims of dwindling advertising revenues due to the recession. They were also victims of the trend for local papers to be swallowed up by conglomerates, which obsess more about the bottom line than publishing the truth.

Why bother with trained editorial staff, they reason, when work experience internees can process press releases for nothing? For that matter, why not just close down the newspaper? Free speech is an expensive irrelevancy when shareholders’ dividends are the priority.

Some councils, to give them their due, have filled the gap by publishing their own free sheets. Out-of-work journalists who get a position on them, however, claim they are pressured to toe the governing party’s line – or find another job.

Little chance of impartial reporting there, then.

Where local papers have survived, there are too few journalists to report on proceedings in the magistrates’ and county courts or to report on council meetings. Or to report on much at all.

It is a blow to democracy and the citizen’s right to know, in the public interest, what their elected representatives are doing – how, when, with what and to whom.

Moving away from the provinces, let’s seek reassurance from the national press and what it is doing to hold aloft the torch of truth and impartiality.

Wednesday 7 April was the first full day of the 2010 general election and the tabloid press, alas, made no secret of where they and their proprietors stand in the political spectrum. To describe them as partisan is to understate the case.

The Daily Express, which modestly describes itself as ‘the world’s greatest newspaper’, warned readers that this was their ‘last chance to save Britain’ after ‘years of Labour misery’. The first two inside pages variously praised the Tories for quashing the cider tax and attacked Gordon Brown for the ‘devastating £1,000-a-year tax bomb’ he plans to drop on our hapless heads if returned to office.

The reliably right-wing TaxPayers’ Alliance obligingly put the boot in on Brown, as did, or so the newspaper claimed, the conveniently anonymous ‘Labour chiefs’ who were ‘privately furious’ that the Tories were doing so well.

Not much balanced reporting there, then, although lots of it.

The Daily Mirror, alone among the tabloids, still flies the flag for Labour. ‘Don’t get conned’, read its front-page headline superimposed on photographs of David Cameron and George Osborne.

Luckily for those of its readers already bored with the election, the paper then devoted page three to Cheryl Cole’s ‘TOTAL HAIR MAKEOVER!!!’. The author of the piece breathlessly tells us that she would ‘estimate at least a dramatic QUARTER OF AN INCH has been trimmed from those oh-so-worth-it locks'. The subsequent double-page spread of a statesman-like Gordon Brown flanked by the loyal cohorts of his Labour empire is an anticlimax after such hot news about the hair-do of Cheryl, 26.

The Sun, wot won it before, is solidly behind the Tories. The front-page headline read: ‘D-Dave’, summoning memories of the heroic deeds of our armed forces in June 1944 – more than 20 years before Cameron was born.

Page three’s Katie, 25, from Liverpool, and clearly not just a pretty face, echoed the words of the sixth US president John Quincy Adams when she urged readers to use their vote. And then, more politically correct, we were back to photos of politicians with blue ties, a cartoon of ‘bottler Brown’ KO’d in the boxing ring by Cameron and a vox pop of discontented voters, including the voice of liberal reason: a cab driver.

The Daily Mail was the most even-handed of the tabloids, sneering at all three leaders’ wives and reporting the patrician Camerons’ £500,000-plus joint annual income. Such balance was leavened, however, by scare stories about Labour stealth taxes (so stealthy they are in the newspapers) and impending railway strikes.

And so I repeat my question: when did reporters stop reporting the news and become political propagandists instead? What is the journalist’s job? Is it still finding out and reporting what’s going on, because how else will everyone know? Or is it convincing the readers, because of their proprietors’ commercial or political interests, to vote in a certain way?

And here I get personal. Any reporter on the Law Society Gazette so foolhardy and unprofessional as to write a one-sided news story, without a balancing view, supported by facts and quotes from named individuals, would (and I put this euphemistically) arouse the ire of the editors.

Fingers crossed this blog meets with their favour.