My letter about the Guardian pissing in the face if its readers to the LRB (unpublished)
Posted by scrabb
on December 15, 2018, 8:58 pm
on December 15, 2018, 8:58 pm| [I never thought the LRB would publish my letter and they didn't disappoint me. Of course their reason could be that it's just a poor letter with badly expressed views. They're entitled to that opinion. But I suspect the views it contains are simply not acceptable to them, no matter how well or poorly expressed. But I could be wrong.] As an old-fashioned establishment journalist himself (and ex-Guardian to boot) I suppose it was only to be expected that in his long review of Alan Rusbridger’s Breaking News, James Meek failed to spot the elephant in the room even when it was sitting on his foot. He writes of below the line comments to news items and articles in the Guardian as often being “partisan, shrill or abusive”. Well, yes, they are, but no more partisan, shrill or abusive than the stories and especially the op-ed pieces they’re commenting on. The orchestrated campaign waged against Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, before and after his election as leader of the Labour party, was virulent in the extreme, and also unprecedented. Practically every writer of this supposedly left-of-centre newspaper was so frothing-at-the-mouth incensed and vitriolic you might have thought the man had done them some personal injury or slept with their daughters. Did any of these same writers ever attack a Tory leader in such a sustained, vicious manner? Remind me who and when. The paper’s treatment of Julian Assange — one might justifiably call it a betrayal —was and still is another low point in its editorial policy. Lower, in my opinion. Here is a man who has done what journalists are supposed to do — exposing the corrupt and criminal practices the rich and powerful want to keep hidden — and which the Guardian itself has profited from by publishing its global “scoops”, and after abandoning Assange they resort to character assassination dressed up as snide college rag humour (at its unfunniest) of a man whose health and life itself are in serious jeopardy through confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy because he rightly fears being extradited and banged up for life in an American stockade. But what have these instances to do with the main thesis of Rusbridger’s book and James Meek’s review? And where’s the elephant in the room? While it’s certainly true that the Guardian’s print circulation has dwindled by two-thirds over the past ten years, it isn’t solely the fault of free online news platforms. By choosing to suck up to the US corporate establishment, Rusbridger and the current editor, Kath Viner, have alienated the paper’s core readership in the UK … well, alienated is putting a flattering gloss on it. Antagonised and infuriated are nearer the mark. You only had to read the below the line comments to nearly all the articles on Corbyn and Assange to gauge that 8 or 9 readers out of ten disagreed fundamentally with the views expressed. It’s no mystery — but still a wonderment — why the editors and the board, seeing this tsunami of opposition and rejection, day after day, still chose the kamikaze option of pissing in the faces of their most ardent and loyal supporters: saying in effect, the US corporate neo-con audience is our digital advertising market (and our masters); let’s go for it and #### the rest. And of course many of its British readers reacted accordingly. No mention of this from James Meek. He’s astute enough to get it, so why not? Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the readers’ comments facility itself has undergone a change in recent times: curtailed or cancelled or just not available. So much for “Comment is Free” then. The title of the review, “The Club and the Mob”, accurately summed up the reasons why the Guardian’s readership has declined so steeply. But its significance and portent weren’t grasped by the reviewer. The “veteran columnist” who declared he was “on the side of the Club” (and therefore not the Mob) reveals the lofty, patrician attitude that many readers might have surmised but now saw at first hand in the sniffily dismissive responses to their comments. Up until then, op-ed writers were snug and complacent and safe. They might get the odd critical letter but no one — no reader, that is — ever saw it; now the opinion-makers were being bombarded daily by readers who had the temerity to actually disagree with them and take them to task, and worse still — Oh Calamity! — it was out in the open for everyone to read. It got them rattled. And nettled. Where once they had handed down their wisdom to an audience of mainly docile if intelligent readers with no other choice but to accept it, the ungrateful swine had turned into “the Mob”. I haven’t read Breaking News yet, but I’ll bet my last sixpence that Rusbridger doesn’t address or even mention this transformation and awakening of the Guardian’s readership as a cause for its decline. The USA is the No. 1 terrorist state in the world http://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/thread/1544907534.html
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