Grant Shapps: His threat to cut the BBC licence fee means “show respect or you’ll suffer”

The new web journalism allows you to discover what readers want by seeing how many hits an article attracts — and I wish it didn't. I now know that if I want to impress my editor at the Observer — and what journalist does not want to impress his or her editor? — the easiest way to make my piece the most-read article on the Guardian and Observer's comment site is to launch an attack on the Tory press in general and the Daily Mail in particular. The more vitriolic I am, the more filled with hate my prose becomes, the more, in short, that I write like the very tabloid journalists I am condemning, the more the readers will like it.

To make sure my piece is a success, I will imply or state outright that the Mail brainwashes its readers, reinforcing their sexism, racism, homophobia and contempt for the poor. When you assign that level of malevolent power to a newspaper the only logical conclusion is that it should be censored or banned. For how can you fight prejudice while allowing the propaganda that creates it to continue unchecked?

Equally if I were a columnist on the Mail or the Telegraph, I would tear into the BBC. I would say that it was a nest of moneyed hypocrites, whose managers spouted leftist opinions, while pocketing the taxes of hard-working licence-fee payers. The phrases "Hampstead liberal", "fashionable views", "poll tax licence fee", "dumbed-down" and, above all, "bias" would dot my piece like parmesan shavings on pasta. I'd be clear that the reason why so many in Britain did not agree with the views of Mail or Telegraph readers was not because their views were doltish or incoherent in any way — for that can never be admitted on the Right as much as the Left. Rather, large sections of the public failed to endorse traditional morality because their minds had been poisoned by relentless BBC propaganda. Again, the logic of my argument would lead to censorship. A corporation that is so corrupt and corrupting must be constrained or closed.

I once believed that no one read journalists who wrote about other journalists. I assumed the wider public was bored by the self-reference and self-aggrandisement. But the hit counters don't lie. They show that readers love journalists condemning other journalists in the most violent terms, and will join in with the condemnations online.

You might say that I am missing the point. Liberals rage against the brutishness of the tabloids because the tabloids are indeed brutal. More than that, they were allegedly a home for criminal behaviour. Conservatives, meanwhile, denounce BBC bias for the same reason footballers denounce bent referees. The law requires the BBC to be impartial and it is scandalous that it rigs debates. In any case, you could go on to say arguments about journalism are a part of an open society. Today's media culture wars are nothing more than the modern version of the pamphlet wars of the 18th century.

But there's the rub. Britain's culture wars are no longer a part of democratic debate but a threat to democratic debate. On the Left and Right, media criticism attacks the fundamental liberties of this country.