Columnist Ruth Wishart looks at the press today's society 

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The press gets a bad press. Everyone from that nice President Trump down (or do I mean up?) has a pop now at what they call the MSM – shorthand for mainstream media.

Everyone accuses it of peddling fake news, behaving badly towards victims of tragedies large and small, or intruding editorial slants into what should be straight news.

And some of these criticisms are not unfair. The recent report on the Manchester pop concert outrage did find instances of reporters harassing grieving families, sometimes before they had been officially advised of their loss.

Unforgivable and unprofessional but fortunately confined to some of the usual tabloid suspects. The local evening paper, in contrast, was given considerable praise for its sound reportage and general sensitivity.

And we all know that some media outlets can’t see any story go to press without twisting the details into a stick with which to beat anyone who fails to share their often rabid views. (It was ironic this week to hear one English tabloid manufacturing outrage about the appalling treatment of the Windrush migrants when the self same paper more normally lambasts immigration in any shape or form.)

However, this is also the week in which two major media outlets in America, The New York Times and New Yorker magazine, won a coveted Pulitzer prize for their coverage of sexual harassment and assault by some major celebrities, despite the latter using every manner of legal threat to try and prevent publication. #MeToo, one of the most powerful campaigns ever mounted, would not have happened without the courage of the editors and writers involved.

Nearer home, it was the dogged persistence of a writer in Britain’s Observer newspaper, Carole Cadwalladr, which broke the major story about how Cambridge Analytica had used data to target voters in American elections, and possibly our own referenda. She has been chasing this scoop for a year and, with the help of Channel 4 and The New York Times in the latter stages, managed to hold some very powerful data gatherers and sellers like Facebook to account.

Similarly, although the UK Home Office has now been shamed into reversing its persecution of Commonwealth migrants who came here as children at our invitation, once again it was dogged journalistic persistence allied to publishing individual case histories which finally made the government make a long overdue U-turn.

These are big and important stories, and they reached the public domain not through the dubious channels of social media – which, we now know, foreign governments can infiltrate by setting up false accounts with fake names to spread disinformation – but through the much reviled MSM.

What these stories illustrate is that there is still a place and a need for honest journalism – the kind that is not afraid to speak truth to power, and not afraid to put in the hours standing that truth up regardless of the often threatening behaviour of those whose misdeeds are uncovered.