
Long reads shortened
Britain’s “ancestral disdain” for business
Britain’s media is obsessed with political gossip, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg. Newspapers splash endless revelations about Partygate and Beergate as if they’re “matters of war and peace”. Columnists constantly muse about whether Johnson will survive and who could replace him. Yet most of this is “small change at best and irrelevant at worst”. And it crowds out the stuff that really matters: business news. Big companies like Amazon, Google and Tesla are “changing the world at breakneck speed”, and new technologies such as artificial intelligence and gene therapy “will change it even faster”. Giant new firms from Asia will in time shift the balance of global power from the West to the East. Yet in the British press, business news is “relegated to the back of the paper along with sport and horoscopes”.