What is it with Hacked Off’s inability to be able to express a view on a single subject without a great whopping conflict of interest? Now it seems they have extended their remit from control of the press to what our children should be learning at school. This time they’ve been irked by the decline in students studying Media Studies, presumably a secret conspiracy organised by the state, newspapers and Rupert Murdoch to make children learn about science.

“Last week’s announcement of the ‘A’ level results provided an opportunity for sections of the press to indulge a pet obsession of bashing media studies as an academic discipline. The negativity is a particularly British obsession which you won’t find in the US where there is a much more healthy interchange between academics researching media issues and the media itself. The attitude found depressingly often in some British newsrooms, that studying the workings of the press in a systematic and critical way should be a bar to working in the business, would be greeted with incomprehension by most in the US.”

Of course Hacked Off fail to mention the massive conflict of interest in them bemoaning the decline of Media Studies: studying the media is exactly what their half-baked, third-rate academics like Brian Cathcart, Professor of Journalism at Kingston University, make a living out of teaching up and down the country. Of course they want children to study it, otherwise they’d be out of a job. Schoolboy stuff…