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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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