Recently some of my Facebook friends joined a group called something like “I won’t buy the Independent again if Rod Liddle becomes editor”, and I thought briefly of joining. But I haven’t. The simple reason is that I almost never buy the paper anyway, because it’s boring. It’s a paper consisting of shrill front-page headlines with fairly middle-of-the-road news coverage and opinion pieces by people I either don’t care for or have never heard of.
Still, its takeover by Rod Liddle, who has a long record of misogyny and racism (whatever he might like to call it), would be a disaster for both the British media and for the paper itself. The paper isn’t really a liberal paper anymore, but Liddle’s editorship would lead it to be the poor third cousin on the right-wing broadsheet market. What could happen is that the paper could end up as an outlet for a vicious brand of bigoted right-wing thought for the lower middle-classes, away from the neo-cons of the Times and the High Tories of the Telegraph. There isn’t a broadsheet which caters to this kind of mentality, although the Spectator already does. However, it would lose a fair proportion of its existing readership.
It goes to show how lax the ownership rules in the British media are. This whole idea comes from the Russian businessman, Alexander Lebedev, who clearly wants to make a bit of money by stoking pointless controversy and bigotry, like so many British media barons. It should be stopped.
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“I won’t buy the Independent again if Rod Liddle becomes editor” As it’s also suggested it will become a freesheet, there’d be no need to buy it again.
I used to read the independent back when I was at uni. It’s a shame that it’s being bought by these guys. I agree that it’s a boring read.
I wonder where Robert Fisk will go? I can’t imagine him staying there now. mash´s last blog ..Glue (live) by Friends of Design
Newspaper moguls who think they can flog papers to the public using insinuatingly and obnoxious persons can think again because I have plenty of examples of why such persons fail. We don’t purchase goods because of a personality cult, but because they make us feel good and clever knowing something other people don’t know just like books.
What is it that we will learn from this Jamaican hater that we already don’t know unless he wants to come out as “gay”?
I’m not really sure what to make of Liddle. He does have some pretty reprehensible views, but he put together a half-decent documentary defending belief in god a while back. His anti-atheist rhetoric however, seems to be his only redeeming feature.
Btw, the Indy is getting a fair bit of coverage from their ‘new editor’ story. Suzanne moore is also being touted as a candidate. The story that keeps on giving, it seems.