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Something has gone badly wrong: people loathe politicians, distrust the press and increasingly fear each other.It's easy to blame Russian trolls, Facebook news feeds, or the sinister manipulation of 'big data' -- but these are all symptoms of an abusive thirty-year relationship between politics, the media, and a new information age.Interviewing everyone from Tony Blair to Michael Gove, top journalists to Russian bloggers, and tech giant execs to online activists, Tom Baldwin describes a vicious battle for control of the news agenda, at the expense of public trust and the value of truth. He shows how technological change has hollowed out space for virulent new populist alternatives, including the so-called 'alt-right' and 'alt-left'. And he warns that not only extremists, but also the progressive centre, may now decide to press 'delete' on liberal democracy altogether.Ctrl Alt Delete is a brutally honest and sometimes funny account of how our democracy was crashed -- and whether we can still re-boot it.
About the author
Tom Baldwin has spent the best part of three decades in the thick of politics and the media. He has worked as communications director for the Labour Party, political editor of The Sunday Telegraph, assistant editor of The Times, and The Times’ Washington bureau chief.
Report
'A well-written, often funny, sometimes elegiac and occasionally angry musing on how the worlds of politics and the media have been changed for the worse in the past decade.'
