Mic Wright’s Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters opens not with a clever anecdote or an industry joke, but a death. “It was 19 April 2019,” he writes. “I opened Twitter and almost immediately I saw the news: my friend, the journalist Lyra McKee, had been shot and killed the night before in Derry.” McKee was 29. The circumstances of her death (killed while reporting in Creggan) are by now well documented, and painfully so, especially if you’ve seen the hard-hitting documentary Lyra. But Wright’s use of her memory isn’t ornamental. He says it plainly: “This book is not about good journalists like Lyra.” That line tells you what the rest of the book is, a story not of heroism but of decline. Not accidental decline either. Decay by design. The journalism industry as cautionary tale.
I first came across Wright during the earlier stages of that decay, when he was tweeting as @brokenbottleboy—acerbic, often furious, but surgically accurate. He appeared on Substack, where his newsletter Conquest of the Useless carried the same bite. He now writes regularly in Byline Times, one of the few British publications that still seem to believe media criticism matters. Breaking is the logical culmination of that trajectory. A book written by someone with too much experience to romanticise journalism and too much residual affection to walk away from it. This isn’t an outsider’s hit job. It’s an insider’s reckoning.
Wright divides the book into twelve chapters, each tackling a core question. How people become journalists, who owns the press, what counts as a story, how ethics are diluted, what happens when impartiality becomes branding. In one sense, it’s a primer. In another, it’s a funeral procession. Most books of this kind borrow from the Leveson playbook. Dissecting Murdoch, praising the BBC, calling for regulation. Wright doesn’t play that game. He’s funnier and angrier than that. And he doesn’t pretend he’s innocent either. “I’m no saint,” he writes. “And am very aware of the glass house in which I’m typing these words.”
The best chapter is the first. “Becoming a Journalist” is a memoir of failure and misdirection, class friction and bad luck, littered with references—Transmetropolitan, John le Carré, The Joy of Flex. Wright charts a course from Pensions World to Q Magazine to being suspended from Stuff for moonlighting. It’s funny, self-lacerating, and brutally honest about how young writers are chewed up and spat out. He calls journalism “an affliction,” and by the end of the chapter you believe him. It’s the strongest argument in the book: that journalism doesn’t need saving by those who made it toxic.
Wright also tells a story many know but few dare admit: journalism is a posh person’s trade. Not by accident, not even by inertia, but by deliberate gatekeeping. “Just 11 per cent of journalists hadn’t been to university at all,” he notes, and of the rest, Oxbridge dominates like a colonial hangover. The same names hire the same names. A supposedly meritocratic industry that routinely rewards mediocrity. Well as long as it’s well spoken and confident in a meeting.
The structural critique builds from there. Chapter Two (“Who Owns the News?”) is a straight historical descent into the media sewer—Harmsworth, Northcliffe, Murdoch. It’s written with style and menace. Wright knows his villains (and not the South London kind), and he doesn’t pretend Murdoch is some Machiavellian outlier. He’s the rule, not the exception. The punchlines are sharp: “The Sun isn’t upmarket, but it is shit; the kind of shit that fills rivers, poisons seas and swamps entire ecosystems.” No filter, no flattery. The prose here feels closest to his Twitter origins. Quick, cruel, and devastatingly effective.
Other chapters pull the camera back: on what makes a story (“What’s the Story?”), on opinion as performance (“A Matter of Opinions”), on political coverage as theatre (“Political Theatre”). Wright doesn’t bother with false balance. He skewers the lobby, destroys the commentariat, mocks the idea that balance and truth are the same thing. He saves some of his sharpest lines for newspaper columnists: “Columnists simply pretend their minds are wiped on a regular basis, allowing them to totally disavow previous opinions that now look idiotic or cruel.” Anyone who’s followed the careers of Rod Liddle, Dan Hodges, Allison Pearson or Toby Young knows exactly what he means. Memory, for these people, is a professional hazard.
What holds the book together is tone. Wright’s voice is consistent, abrasive, and weary. There’s something of the late 90s music journalist about it: all footnotes, allusions, confessions, and clipped insults. He doesn’t want to be liked. He wants to be right. But every now and then, something softer breaks through. When he talks about being assaulted, or misrepresented, or when he admits how close he came to giving up. There’s a vulnerability that rescues the book from cynicism. He writes like someone who still wants journalism to matter, even if he can’t quite believe it will.
If there’s a weakness, and this is a minor quibble, it’s structural. The book is slightly uneven in places, some chapters drag, some compress too much. But that messiness also makes it feel alive. This isn’t a tidied-up TED Talk, far from it. This is written by someone still in the fight.
There’s a line buried in the middle that stuck with me: “Young writers are often lured into mining their personal lives and, more importantly, personal problems when they really shouldn’t.” It sums up what Wright has seen and what he’s resisting. Journalism now eats its young. It promises exposure and delivers exhaustion. It weaponises trauma. And behind it all are the same proprietors, the same editors, the same brokers of power.
Wright doesn’t offer a plan for saving the press. Instead he does something more useful. He shows you where it’s rotting, who’s still profiting, and why most reformers are already compromised. In that sense, Breaking isn’t just a book about journalism. It’s a warning about every institution that insists it’s neutral, noble, and necessary. The kind that gets you killed for trying to tell the truth.
I want to end by saying this is a good book. Written by someone who’s proud of their craft, who knows his politics, and who still has plenty to say. Wright isn’t looking for redemption, and he doesn’t offer any. But he’s a sharp critic of a trade he hasn’t given up on entirely and that makes Breaking worth your time.
