By and large, Britain does not have a free press. Our media is not run by the government, and nor does it engage in widespread censorship. Instead, the media is run by a tiny group of politically motivated moguls, themselves in league with other private interests through advertising or personal networks. Journalists from non-privileged backgrounds are filtered out through unpaid internships and expensive post-graduate qualifications, ensuring the media is a closed shop for the well-to-do. According to a report published by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission last August, over half of the top 100 media professionals are privately educated. News coverage all too often reflects the priorities, concerns and prejudices of this tiny sliver of the British population. Rather than being a means to hold the powerful to account and fairly report issues, the media is the ultimate political lobbyist for our elite.

Peter Oborne, a man of integrity and courage, has done us a huge service. With the disappearance of secure journalism jobs, most journalists can simply not speak out about journalistic practices without permanently banishing themselves from the industry. As well as the Telegraph allegedly purging proper coverage of HSBC’s role in tax evasion from its pages because of advertising, we now know the Barclay brothers took a loan from this disreputable bank. Rather than take all these allegations seriously, the Telegraph has written a temper tantrum in the form of an editorial, lashing out at “the BBC, the Guardian and their ideological soulmates in the Labour party”.

Telegraph's Peter Oborne resigns, saying HSBC coverage a 'fraud on readers' Read more

But there is some honesty in its editorial: that it is “the champion of British business and enterprise”, for example. Almost all media outlets serve this function, even if they are not so candid about it. The media polices the boundaries of acceptable debate in Britain, helping to ensure that the national conversation is on the terms most favourable to those with wealth and power. According to the opinion polls, most Britons want public ownership of rail and energy, higher taxes on the rich and a statutory living wage. Yet despite the fact such policies are political common sense among the public, they are ignored or actively opposed by almost all media outlets. If you are one of the very few commentators with a media platform that advocates them, you are treated as chronically naive, or as a dinosaur who isn’t aware of their own extinction. Support for privatisation, untrammelled free markets, lower taxes on the rich – all of this is treated almost as objective truth. Columnists who support the political status quo are treated as thoughtful and nuanced; the tiny few that deviate are treated as predictable.

This doesn’t just go for the corporate-owned press. Detailed research by Cardiff University finds that the BBC is biased in favour of corporate and establishment voices. Its political coverage is dominated by former Tory or overtly rightwing figures; the Tories – including David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson – heavily recruit from Auntie Beeb. As anyone on the left who has appeared on the BBC will know, neoliberalism is its commonsense and starting point.

What about the Guardian? The paper is unique for being owned by a trust rather than a media mogul. I often disagree with the Guardian’s editorial positions, sometimes passionately, because I’m a socialist and it is a liberal newspaper. But I have never been prevented from writing what I think. We desperately need more opponents of the status quo in the mainstream media. The reason we don’t have any is because – in our deeply compromised democracy – the media is so often there to serve the interests of the rich.