Bad idea for Guardian journalists to choose editor: Mallick
Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger is leaving his job after 20 years that saw the biggest changes newspapers have seen in their history. When he started editing the world’s best newspaper in February 1995, colour news photos were freshly born and websites were “exotic,” he wrote in his farewell note.
Now newspaper “profits” are “exotic,” which makes me laugh in a hollow way.
But there’s more gobsmacking news from the British paper: Guardian and Observer journalists will get to vote on the next editor-in-chief.
Rusbridger won last time. No one’s saying it’s a clincher; it will merely be used as a guide when the panel of the Scott Trust, which owns the title, makes its selection. But still, what a bad idea. It’ll be the barnyard vote in Orwell’s Animal Farm, a pigs-and-sheep cabal.
After the announcement, I looked at the comments on possible winners. “Bet it’s Nick Clegg,” one reader said gloomily. Others suggested Nigel Farage (Britain’s snaggle-toothed national assistant racist) or Kim Jong-un. Plus the frequent “removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards.”
I’m saying The Fifth EstatePeter Capaldi, who played Rusbridger in The Fifth Estate, the WikiLeaks movie. I’ve loved Capaldi since he played Vera, a sweet suicidal transvestite in Prime Suspect 3 (about Westminster pedophiles, a news story the Guardian is covering now). He also played a political madman in the British comedy The Thick of It. A gentle psychopath, yes, Capaldi could be an editor.
Never ask people who they’d like to be ruled by. People vote out of self-interest. Never mind Rusbridger, a piano-playing intellectual with Harry Potter eyeglasses and deeply strange hair, I’d vote for anyone who’d get me a desk out from under the central heating vent and buy the newsroom a coffee turbine.
Rusbridger is a fine editor, a tolerant, calm, clever man with ferocious and weird talents but also with the sang-froid that enabled him to psychologically survive terrible times when the government and the Murdoch-owned tabloids were after his blood because the Guardian had exposed the phone-hacking scandal. How would it end, News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks was asked. With “Alan Rusbridger on his knees, begging for mercy,” she said.
It isn’t pleasant to hear things like that, or know that people exist —powerful people who exchange flirty horse-controlling emails with the British PM — who think that way. The vindication that came years later — the News of the World dead, Murdoch’s hacks jailed, Brooks herself weeping on the witness stand — wouldn’t have reduced the pain of going to work every day with your job entirely on the line over several stories that kept producing gold for years. Rusbridger trusted his editors, reporters and columnists in an era when it’s cheaper to fire them and never look back.
Other editors would ease the strain by kicking small dogs or sailing down an alcoholism trench of their own digging. But Rusbridger had a dream, to attend piano camp in his off-hours to Ballade No. 1learn in one year to play Chopin’s Ballade No. 1. I have a dream that one day I can listen to Chopin without being bored (but I am a bit of rough from Kapuskasing. Chopin always looks like endless treelines to me, bar graphs made of firs), but I take Rusbridger’s point. Application, dexterity, the transfer of the brain’s attention from the police smashing newsroom hard drives to working on your fingering — these are useful in times of stress.
Rusbridger is leaving next summer to become chair of the Scott Trust, the entity whose financing allows the Guardian to survive. Every newspaper dreams of being a rich man’s eye candy — the Washington Post has the repellent Jeff Bezos — but the Scott Trust is the real thing, “one of the most important liberal institutions in the world,” as Rusbridger says.
He means it. The Guardian means it. It has just redesigned its Guardian Unlimited website, which had expanded to the U.S. and earned a rise in digital ads that may save the paper. But the redesign invites even more reader comments at a time when many news websites are shutting down the violent, racist, libellous abuse that runs beneath the news like a chemical tank leak.
But the un-paywalled Guardian really does believe in equality and democracy. It spends money moderating the comments. (Me, I just race through them favouriting the jokes, those being what Brits are best at.) “Comments are free but facts are sacred” said Guardian editor C.P. Scott in 1921, but I’m not sure about the comments bit.
I have a deep grudge against Rusbridger, and like all hurts, it is petty. The Guardian wanted to expand its reach beyond Europe and the U.S. so it chose, I’m taking it, a country in need, a nation it felt desperately sorry for.
It chose Australia, perhaps because Rusbridger met the appalling Tony Abbott at a party and was overcome with liberal guilt. I was moaning on Twitter about the Guardian choosing the Aussies over us. We have a PM easily as unpleasant as the racist and misogynist Abbott! Climate change is slamming Canada, too! We have racism, aboriginal people and tall-poppy syndrome. We don’t have local shrimp but we have pickerel. And jackfish.
“I love Canada,” Rusbridger responded on Twitter. Well, I wish he loved us as much as he loved Australia.
It takes 23 hours to fly to Sydney from London. Toronto’s quicker, just saying. Maybe the Scott Trust could have adopted the nice liberal Toronto Star. We could have razed our grey shoebox opera house and built one in the harbour. Oh, I had wild dreams.
I hold no grudges. As other newspapers become nullities, the Guardian and its sister Observer paper sail on nobly, friend to all, offering upmarket and down, its Comment editors meticulously polite and fair. Canada’s best newspapers are run by fast, funny clever Brits who couldn’t beat the British class system and came here. I laugh about the doddery New York Times expanding to London. If it is possible to dull down London, they will do it.
This week I lost Stephen Colbert and Alan Rusbridger. If anything happens to Noam Chomsky this weekend, my Christmas is ruined.
