IMAGINE, for a moment, that you are paid to dispense respectable opinion on a British mainstream paper. You are trying to defend your country against wildly exaggerated slanders from people who know nothing much about it. You may even be trying to work out in clear historical terms who was responsible for which mistakes. Nothing that you write or think will make any difference to the narrative already established in the minds of your enemies.

How you must long for the distant days when you could treat the Church of England with exactly the same contemptuous ignorance as Elon Musk treats the whole country, and make very similar demands for the punishment of scapegoats and the wholesale replacement of the ruling junta. I’m thinking in particular of the Times leader on Christmas Day, which accused the Archbishop of York of twice reappointing David Tudor as “area dean of Essex”.

But that is a trivial slip compared with the larger mistake of supposing that the Archbishop of Canterbury is some kind of chief executive: “For the church to recover its morale and reputation, it needs new leadership, and it needs it soon. . . While Lord Evans [the chair of the CNC] will have to be certain that his preferred candidate has a clean record, he needs to accelerate the process of finding a new incumbent as Archbishop of Canterbury with a blameless past and a vision for the future. Without a powerful new leader, an institution so damaged may be doomed to crumble further.”

This isn’t poisonous, like Mr Musk’s rantings on X, but it’s scarcely any better informed about the way things work.

About the underlying scandals of “grooming gangs”, Julie Bindel, in UnHerd, and Suzanne Moore, in the Telegraph, both wrote with deep first-hand knowledge and compassion, as well as a commitment to the truth, which offended the prejudices of every paper that they have written for, most notably The Guardian, which forced both of them out. To judge by the comments in the right-wing press, the readers hate them there as well.

What is of interest to this column, though, is how irrelevant the mainstream press has become. The demand from low-information consumers for still lower information content has pitched them into a race for the bottom which they cannot hope to win. The Mail Online is probably the most successful attempt to build an ad-supported site by a mainstream organisation, and every single story is there to appeal to one of the seven deadly sins.

Once you see this pattern at all, you see it everywhere. Almost every section in a print newspaper can be retitled by its presiding sin: Pride for the sports pages; Anger, for the news; Gluttony for the consumer journalism; Lust (mostly) for the culture pages; and so on. But all these things, or sins, can be offered in much higher doses in other media now.

For instance, when The New York Times sent a journalist to spend a fortnight getting his news only from Rumble, a right-wing version of YouTube, he followed standard American practice and emailed the hosts of the shows that he had been watching for their comments. This courtesy was immediately turned into more fodder for rage: “The co-host of ‘The Roseanne Barr Podcast,’ posted the email I sent him to his X account. Rumble’s chief executive reposted it, then Elon Musk reposted that to his more than 200 million followers. My phone number was visible, and apparently seen more than 50 million times on the platform, so I was soon flooded with angry phone calls and texts calling my article (which hadn’t yet been published) a ‘hit job’ focused on World War III.”

I don’t think there is any escape from this dynamic. It wouldn’t matter so much if all that the new platforms offered was delicious emotions, like the Turkish delight of Narnia. But they can also do, without effort, something that successful newspapers really had to work at: they can make some kinds of news unimaginable.

On a newspaper, this requires a kind of active and conscious editorial control. On the internet, no human needs to keep the readers ignorant of the things that they don’t want to know. It’s all done algorithmically. If you show that you like something by not immediately moving away, the system will show you more of the same opinion and the same set of facts, endlessly repeated, until you are plagued by nightmares about the Muslim invasion of Britain, or even the Area Dean of Essex.