The Collected Lebrecht is called ‘Conduct Unbecoming’

Those friendly folk at Standpoint magazine added up the essays and columns I had written for them these past four years and decided they had enough for an e-book. Then they asked for an introduction, a kind of Weltanschauung as to where music is heading in mass media.

That was easy.

It begins:

In the summer of 2009, I gave up on newspaper journalism. The immediate cause was the fire sale of the paper on which I was Assistant Editor to a Russian KGB man, an early beneficiary of the Putin kleptocracy. Without lingering to judge the new owner, I had no trouble deciding that print journalism had shed most of its values, as well its readers, in a spiral of self-destruction that some regarded as a perfect firestorm.

A frantic pursuit of reluctant new readers in a video-led society had bred an ethics-free appetite for sensation and a strenuous justification of the unjustifiable. The day I found myself defending our front-page picture of a businesswoman leaping to her death from the upper floors of a London hotel was the day I realised how far my vocation had fallen from its once-lofty self-perception. 

I’m afraid you’ll have to download the book if you want to read more. It costs £2.99. Click here.