gypsum fantastic

Spectator death-spiral I

Another rant about British journalism.

Boris Johnson is many things. A mayor with a knack for losing deputies. A remarkable journalist who does not take himself too seriously. A rather good editor, who improved The Spectator no end. How much? Well, it’s pretty easy to work out how much by observing the dreadful nonsense being pushed by the current editorial team.

It feels like shooting fish in a barrel, but Mad Mel Phillips is given a slot to say things in the Speccie that the Mail won’t let her say. That’s right. There are things that the Mail won’t let her publish. True, you can scaremonger about vaccinating your children in the Mail, and you can fret that gay marriage is the Achilles’ heel of civilisation. But, it transpires, you can’t say that Barack Obama is a Muslim Manchurian candidate in the Mail.

Happily, there is no such bar in the Speccie. The whackier the claim the better.

Indeed, according to Melanie Phillips, Obama, when not acting as a sleeper president for Islam, is also a secret Communist.

Yes. At the same time. Entirely unencumbered by fact or reason, Mad Mel has actually built a pretty solid case. But it’s very subtle. If he was a communist, you see, he wouldn’t govern as a communist - because that is what you’d expect a Red to do. So, by not acting as a communist, he proves he’s not one.

He’s staying one step ahead of supersleuths like Mel by not doing anything suspicious at all. But gifted gumshoe that she is, that just plays into her hands. And, as if that were not evidence enough that he’s a revolutionary, he has appointed centrist technocrats to his team. Brilliant. That’s exactly what a communist hiding his inner communist would do.

The rest of the Speccie’s online team isn’t quite so bonkers (Alex Massie and Clive Davis are rather intelligent, charming chaps). But most of it is lousy.

The “Coffee House”, their group blog, is a forum for relentless brown-nosing. The Spectator uses its online presence, where talk is cheap, to suck up to important Tories so that its journalists are able to punch above their rather pathetically meagre circulation. Who would talk to weakly dullards such as Fraser Nelson or James Forsyth if there wasn’t a chance of having a gushing online write-up?

This all points to a coherent strategy for a slightly crappy magazine with few readers. Win more google juice and eyeballs by allowing mental Mel free rein. Win over would-be interviews with patsy questions and partisanship so they’ll talk to them. But the madness doesn’t stop online.

Oh no. These people are allowed space in the magazine.

And now, they’ve commissioned a piece from James Delingpole, a relentlessly tedious bore from the failing Telegraph, to puff a book by Ian Plimer. Now, I think George Monbiot is a pompous arse. And much too lefty for me. But, frankly, he’s nailed them. The book they are puffing is monstrous. A waste of time. There are big arguments to be had about climate change, but the nonsense of these psuedo-scientists isn’t helpful to anyone’s case.

It turns out the Barclay Brothers are wrecking the Speccie, much as they are destroying the Telegraph.

The Telegraph death-spiral III

It’s worth noting that the Telegraph’s comment pages are probably the UK’s worst, riven as they are with prejudice, ill-considered yammering and - frankly - grave stupidity.

Exhibit I - Daniel Hannan, an (ex?) Telegraph leader writer and an MEP - around one-tenth as clever as he thinks he is. The Times’ Oliver Kamm and The Guardian’s Michael White have both provided fine demolitions of this tedious peacock, who believes - typically of the Telegraph news pages - that political debate should a liturgy of cant and of old truths rather than, say, evidence. Or reality.

Exhibit II - Alex Singleton, a leader-writer on the paper, whose views are depressingly ridiculous. For example, he thinks (if that is not too strong a word) that the £22bn spectrum auction - in which phone networks bought spectrum rights for as much as they thought the spectrum was worth - was a “stealth tax”. Even though, er, the companies volunteered to pay it. Because they thought it was a money-making opportunity. (The process is outlined here with some of the alternative, awful alternatives set out here). He blames the auction for driving up phone costs, meaning that Orange has particularly bad customer service. The alternative is to give spectrum away cheaply - that is to say, to subsidise mobile phone providers to bring down phone bills, and then make up the difference by taxing everyone else. It is the equivalent of saying that the government should sell any land that it flogs at below market rates to keep the cost of housing down. Mr Singleton is small fry - perhaps it’s unfair to pick on him. But it is important to understand that the Telegraph employs this nakedly stupid man to write its leaders.

Exhibit III - Simon Heffer, a columnist for whom the word “bloviating” could have been invented. Forget the blimpish prose and self-regarding nonsense, what he writes is ill-informed rubbish. The idea that the Tory problem since 1997 has been a lack of right-wingery and insufficent euroscepticism is transparently absurd - and can be disproved thousands of times over by polling results (cf. - every poll in the past 18 months).

Exihibit IV - The Telegraph’s comically ill-informed view on the euro, one provided by its dreadful leader writers (see exhibits I and II) and one provided by Simon Heffer (exhibit III). The dire leader provoked a wonderful response from Oliver Kamm, and Heffer nudged The Economist’s Charlemagne into a rather neat evisceration.

It is striking that, in both articles, the authors are saying what they want to be true. Where the facts do not fit, they bend them.

But that is a key problem that runs from the top of the Telegraph to the bottom.

The Telegraph death-spiral II

There’s some good fun to be had by googling the Telegraph’s website for their apology wording. For example, a quick browse reveals that it made some pretty big post Hutton Report allegations - by accident - and screwed up on the expenses scandal But, yikes, I’d hate to be the person who made this screw-up.

“Our obituary of Lady Jeanne Campbell (Sept 22) said she had a daughter, Cusi Cram, “possibly by a man called Guy Nicholas Lancaster”. In fact Mr Lancaster is Ms Cram’s brother-in-law and was only five when she was born. We apologise to all concerned for our error.”

Quality newspaper? My arse.

The Telegraph death-spiral

The Daily Mail receives an enormous amount of abuse. Much deserved, much undeserved. Sadly, however, the Mail’s special place in folklore detracts from the appalling standard of other papers - especially the Telegraph. An example: 23rd June 2009 —

“Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped, claim scientists at the University of Leicester… Psychologists found that… the skimpier the dress and the more outgoing the woman, the less likely a man was to take no for an answer.”

13th July 2009 —

“Owing to an editing error, our report “Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists” (June 23) wrongly stated that research presented at the recent BPS conference by Sophia Shaw found that women who drink alcohol are more likely to be raped. In fact, the research found the opposite. We apologise for our error.”

An “editing error”? Seriously? They can’t even make an apology accurately. Jeez. No surprise that the Telegraph is finding it hard to hold on to the remarkably few new readers that it won during the expenses fiasco. Newspapers are a public good, underprovided by marketplaces. But if the Telegraph were to disappear tomorrow, British public life would be the better for it.