CRUMBRIA: 02.09.2025
PREPARE for red faces all round at the Carlisle “newspaper”, the News & Shrug.
Recently, the tanking tabloid — along with its mothership, The Crumbling News — assured readers there were “No hotels for asylum seekers!”
Job done. Except it forgot to ask the only question that matters.
If not in hotels, then where?
HMOs? Private rentals? Council housing? B&Bs?
None of this featured in its story. The alleged newspaper’s online discussion of this topic was quietly switched off, preventing any readers from asking.
We don’t call it the News & Shrug for nothing!
This is either a subject the paper doesn’t want to report, or one it considers too hot to properly examine.
Step forward the Conservatives on the Labour-run council.
They’ve tabled questions to the Labour leadership about accommodation types — questions that should force answers into the open at a council meeting next week.
Which means the paper will soon have to tell readers what it should have told them last month, had it bothered to ask a few simple follow-up questions of the authority.
At best, the News & Shrug looks incurious about the biggest political issue of the moment.
At worst, it appears to have been nudging readers along with a gentle: nothing to see here.
When the answers are dragged into the daylight next week, it’ll be up to readers to decide whether the News & Shrug is just plain useless at journalism…or something far worse.
A useful idiot for the Labour Council?
***
READ more: News & Star, 25.08.2025: No asylum seekers in hotels in Cumberland Council area
READ more: The Chronic: 22.08.2025: Paper’s asylum seeker cock-up
thecumbriachronic.co.uk 
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