 Let's get something crystal clear. The evening standard is not a newspaper in a meaningful sense to the word. That was confirmed on Wednesday, when Open Democracy reported how the standard is set to sell its editorial independence to the likes of Uber, Google and others for £3 million a year, promising that money can't buy positive news. That project, titled London 2020, is set to start on June 5th and, unsurprisingly, it's being led on by the paper's editor and former Chancellor George Osborne. Now, it poses a number of problems for people who care about democracy and independent media. First and foremost, because it is set to discard the historic divide between news and advertising, with positive news coverage of partner organisations such as Uber, leaving readers unable to distinguish between that news and paid for advertorials and commercially branded content. The sad reality is, this is nothing new. In fact, it's just the latest episode in the descent of the British media into fake news. There's the fact that George Osborne himself is the editor of the newspaper, a paper which is owned by a bunch of Russian oligarchs and is some kind of weird branding exercise for them. And who was it that conducted the very first interview with Donald Trump in the UK media? It was Michael Goe for The Times. Last time I checked, he's a politician. Danny Finkelstein is the associate editor at that same newspaper while being a Tory Lord. Theresa May's head of communications is Robbie Gibb, the brother of a Tory MP who formerly worked for the Tories himself and in between edited the Daily and Sunday politics programs on the BBC, Boris Johnson. Again, he's meant to be a politician. The Foreign Secretary, no less, still has a column at the Telegraph. Business politics and the media aren't just a revolving door anymore. They're increasingly fused. And while quality journalism is a public good and a necessity for a functioning democracy, if we leave it to the likes of Lebedev, Johnson, Gove, Osborne, we will find ourselves in a profoundly broken society.