Of course. Here it is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4299230,00.html
Why the media are losers Guardian
Thursday November 15, 2001
I don't suppose Polly Toynbee will thank me for saying it, but her column got as close as anything I've read for a while to defining the corrosive negativism of so much of today's print and broadcast media (Our victory has proved the pessimists utterly wrong, November 14).
Sadly, the point she made about the leftwing press echoing the propaganda of the right is one that links the histories of past Labour governments. Add in the competitive pressures of 24-hour TV, the fact that newspapers and broadcasters now care more about being noticed than being informed and the fact that taking things to bits has always been easier than building things, and you have the media we've got.
The good news for Polly is that the public are more intelligent than the media gives them credit for, and they see right through it. Not even the combined forces yesterday of front pages which favoured what might go wrong over what did go right; nor the Today programme's misleading, unscientific and outdated "poll" on Muslim opinion; nor even the massed ranks of commentators on the BBC and elsewhere effortlessly gliding from explaining why the military strategy would never work to complaining that it had worked too quickly could persuade many British people that yesterday was anything other than a very good day for the coalition, for Afghanistan and its people.
Alastair Campbell
Director of communications and strategy 10 Downing Street
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Chris --
Phone: +44 (0) 1865-286793 Email: <chris.brooke at magd.ox.ac.uk> Web: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368