New from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee:
“The CMS Committee has today written to ITV chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall to ask her to attend Parliament to answer questions about the broadcaster’s approach to safeguarding and complaint handling. The session will take place on Wednesday 14th June at 10am.”
A whole committee session dedicated to Schofield. Time to Phil in all the details…
Read the letters below:
Guido always felt the amount of abuse Holly and Phil got for skipping the queue for the Queen was excessive, given countless other hacks got away with it. Indeed, it has to be said that one of Guido’s own reporters took advantage of the fast-track to spend half an hour in Westminster Hall watching the procession. Now, an FoI has revealed just how many other journalists skipped the queue. 733…
Most surprising of all, given they led a lot of the Holly and Phil hate, is the number of Sun hacks who skipped the queue. On September 21 the paper splashed with “Queue-jump Holly Fights to Keep Job”. On October 1 they splashed with “Phil £1M Ads Axed”. The number of Sun journalists who jumped said queue? 35…
ITV themselves, of whom Phil and Holly were just two, sent a whopping 21 journalists along the hack fast-track. The Mail, which broke news of the social media backlash and revealed that Phil and Holly weren’t on the accreditation list, also sent 21 journalists from their various outlets. Taking the crown, however was the BBC, who got 62 journalists in to view the Queen lying in state without queueing up along the Southbank for 12 hours.
The total number of passes being applied for each year has risen from 122 in 2017 to 385 in 2021 – with a peak of 503 in 2019. Of over 1600 applications between 2017-2021, just three were rejected – all from the BBC.
The British media have the ultimate golden ticket to state occasions these days…
Asked by Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby if she ever kicks her shoes off and orders a takeaway, the Maybot malfunctioned and was unable to answer. Could have been worse, at least she didn’t do a Gordon. “I like English food, I like British food…”
