This House Believes that climate protests which disrupt daily life are morally justified.

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "This House Believes that climate protests which disrupt daily life are morally justified.". Your opponent's style: Proposition: City of London School for Girls (our opponent) Opposition: us (the team im in)

Ladies and gentlemen, the question before us is deceptively simple: has journalism lost its way? I would argue that the answer is not merely ‘yes,’ but that the very conditions which once allowed journalism to function with integrity have been systematically dismantled. To deny the depth of this erosion is to ignore the profound structural, economic, and technological forces that have reshaped how information is produced, circulated, and consumed. For most of its history, journalism was sustained by a stable economic model in which accuracy and verification were directly linked to institutional survival. But when the industry shifted from subscription-funded reporting to advertising-driven engagement metrics, the incentives inverted. Truth ceased to be the core commodity. Instead, truth became the costliest and least profitable element of the profession. Engagement replaced rigour. Sensationalism replaced scrutiny. The market now rewards content that provokes emotional intensity rather than intellectual clarity, and journalists, however principled, are forced to operate within that distorted incentive structure. If the economic foundations reward distortion, then distortion becomes not an aberration but an inevitability. Compounding this crisis is the collapse of informational gatekeeping. We often romanticise the ‘democratisation’ of media, but the dissolution of standards without any corresponding mechanisms for verification has produced a landscape defined by epistemic anarchy. The distinction between reporting and speculation, between evidence and assertion, has eroded. Journalists must compete not only with one another but with influencers, conspiracy entrepreneurs, algorithmically amplified rumours, and now vast quantities of AI-generated content. In such an environment, the pressure to publish first and correct later is overwhelming. The velocity of information has eclipsed its reliability, and journalism has been dragged into a perpetual cycle of reaction rather than investigation. This degradation is further intensified by the triumph of tribalism. Journalism has always carried ideological leanings, but what we see today is not mere bias; it is the full-scale alignment of news production with cultural and political identity. Narratives are selected, framed, or suppressed not on the basis of civic responsibility but according to the expectations of a politically loyal audience. When an outlet’s survival depends on affirming a tribe, it ceases to challenge that tribe. It becomes a participant in its worldview, not an observer of reality. The result is a media landscape in which entire segments of the population consume news not as a tool for understanding the world but as an instrument of emotional validation. Once journalism begins to tell people what they wish to hear rather than what they need to know, it has unquestionably lost its way. Equally alarming is the erosion of accountability. Major reporting failures—whether they concern geopolitical conflicts, fabricated sources, or wildly misleading narratives—rarely produce institutional introspection. Instead of transparent correction, we see deflection, defensiveness, and an insistence that criticism itself is a threat to democratic stability. A profession that cannot confront its own errors is a profession that can no longer claim moral authority. The refusal to engage sincerely with its own failures signals a deeper crisis: journalism has become so entangled with power, ideology, and institutional self-preservation that it has forgotten its foundational obligation to the public. And to pre-empt my opponent: pointing to a handful of exceptional investigative journalists does not disprove this argument. Individual integrity does not negate systemic decay. The existence of a few islands of excellence does not mean the ocean is clean; it merely highlights how much land has already been swallowed. So yes—journalism has lost its way, not because journalists themselves are inherently misguided, but because the ecosystem that once upheld accuracy, independence, and public responsibility has been hollowed out. The economic incentives reward outrage. The technological architecture rewards speed over truth. The political climate rewards tribalism over nuance. And the institutions entrusted with informing the public have become beholden to forces that fundamentally undermine that mission. In truth, journalism has not simply wandered off the path. The path itself has been erased.

You've painted a compelling dystopia, but you're fundamentally mistaken about both journalism's past and present. This romanticised vision of a "golden age" where truth was the primary commodity is historical fiction. Journalism has always been messy, biased, and commercially driven - the difference is you're now seeing the sausage being made in real time. Your economic argument collapses under scrutiny. Yes, the business model shifted, but quality journalism is thriving precisely because audiences will pay for it. The New York Times has over 10 million digital subscribers, The Guardian's reader revenue model is working, and investigative outlets like ProPublica operate successfully on donor funding. The market isn't rewarding sensationalism universally - it's rewarding *different types* of journalism for *different audiences*. That's not decay, that's diversification. Your "epistemic anarchy" claim misses the revolutionary accountability mechanisms we now possess. When journalists make errors, they're fact-checked instantly by thousands of experts on social media. Bad reporting gets demolished within hours, not months. The old gatekeepers you mourn often protected terrible journalism through institutional inertia. Remember Judith Miller's WMD reporting? That flourished under your supposedly superior system of editorial oversight. Most tellingly, you've confused visibility with prevalence. We see more journalistic failures today not because there are more failures, but because we see everything. Every mistake, every bias, every editorial decision is now transparent and debatable. The "tribalism" you decry is actually audiences finally having choice in their information sources rather than being force-fed the perspectives of a handful of wealthy publishers. Your argument essentially boils down to: "Journalism was better when fewer people could participate and audiences had fewer options." That's not a defence of quality - that's nostalgia for monopoly.