The Protection of Dan Wootton

The British press has largely sat on its hands while Byline Times has revealed the most serious media scandal for years

The events of the past two weeks have been hugely instructive about how politics and media really works in the UK.

Byline Times’ major revelations about GB News presenter Dan Wootton, which began ten days ago, have driven huge interest in both the UK and US, with our reporting reaching millions of people on our website and across social media.

Yet despite the huge amounts of evidence we have already published on Wootton and the incredibly serious nature of our revelations, the story has been largely ignored by most of the rest of the UK press.

With the honourable exceptions of The Guardian, which has revealed some details of their own investigation into Wootton, and Private Eye, which this week confirmed much of our reporting and revealed that News UK have offered ‘24 hour counselling support’ to members of staff who believe they were targeted by him, most of the British press has refused to so much as touch the story.

Even after the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee wrote to The Sun this week about the scandal, there was relatively little pickup, with the BBC devoting one short paragraph to it in the middle of a much longer report about Huw Edwards.

Evidence of Byline Times’ reporters being threatened and targeted after publication of our story has also received little coverage, beyond a single report on Yahoo News.

So what’s going on here and why does the British press appear so reluctant to shine a light into this particularly dark corner of the industry?