Why undercover footage exposing lobbyists raises concerns for journalism – video explainer
In a practice that appears to create a back door for private companies to influence public opinion, lobbyists for CT Group, which was co-founded by the campaign strategist Lynton Crosby, told an undercover reporter they had paid journalists to place apparently independent stories in newspapers. In a statement, CT Group said: 'We do not comment publicly on work we do for clients and we therefore cannot respond to the specific allegations you have made.' CT Group said the events had been 'deliberately mischaracterised' and it did not engage the undercover journalist to do anything and did not pay him anything.
- ▪In a practice that appears to create a back door for private companies to influence public opinion, lobbyists for CT Group, which was co-founded by the campaign strategist Lynton Crosby, told an undercover reporter they had paid journalists
- ▪In a statement, CT Group said: 'We do not comment publicly on work we do for clients and we therefore cannot respond to the specific allegations you have made.' CT Group said the events had been 'deliberately mischaracterised' and it did no
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2026/jul/31/why-undercover-footage-exposing-lobbyists-raises-concerns-for-journalism-video-explainer |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:42:03 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T15:03:09.041Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T15:03:09.041Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | haan24CGRBJV · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
2:41LobbyingWhy undercover footage exposing lobbyists raises concerns for journalism – video explainer A Guardian investigation has revealed that a political lobbying firm, founded by the former electoral strategist for David Cameron and Boris Johnson, secretly pays journalists to write pieces for British newspapers that are favourable to its clients. In a practice that appears to create a back door for private companies to influence public opinion, lobbyists for CT Group, which was co-founded by the campaign strategist Lynton Crosby, told an undercover reporter they had paid journalists to place apparently independent stories in newspapers.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — UK.
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