Many progressives are excited that Katharine Viner is the new editor-in-chief of the UK Guardian. She replaces Alan Rusbridger who had the job since 1995.
The excitement is understandable given that Viner co-authored a play ten years ago entitled “My Name Is Rachel Corrie.” Relief is understandable given that Ian Katz, who has been editor of the BBC’s Newsnight since 2013, was the other finalist. Jonathan Cook, a Guardian reporter from 1996-2001, told me “Having seen him [Katz] in action, I can understand that fear….He represented all the worst aspects of Rusbridger’s approach and then magnified them. That’s why Newsnight is even more of wet blanket than it was before.”
Richard Gott was once Rusbridger’s boss at the Guardian. He assessed Rusbridger as follows: “When he was a writer, I asked him to investigate Amnesty International and where it got its funding. He came back with a wishy-washy piece that had nothing about its funding. He went to New Zealand when it was in the throes of Rogernomics [Thatcherite policies introduced by Roger Douglas, a Labour finance minister]. He rang up and said there was a Gay Pride march on. That was his level of interest in things.”
I received an email from Rusbridger once. It was a form letter sent to hundreds of readers who had complained about Emma Brockes’ infamous hit piece on Noam Chomsky. Rusbridger retracted the piece and apologized. As horrid as that piece was, Brockes’ fawning interview of Madeleine (“the price is worth it”) Albright in 2003 was worse though for very different reasons. It should have generated a far bigger scandal than her piece on Chomsky.
Today, Brockes regularly cranks out celebrity fluff for the Guardian. It’s a politically safe way to deliver audiences to advertisers. Newspapers in the USA now rely on ads for about 70% of their revenues ($22 billion in ad revenue out of $32 billion total revenue in 2012). The percentage was over 80% in the mid 2000s. The Guardian is now down to 50% because the internet caused it to lose a great deal of ad revenue according Chris Elliott, the Guardian’s readers editor. The snobbiest outlets are freest to experiment with paywalls because exclusion and catering to the elite are what they are openly about anyway. The Guardian, claiming to have a lofty democratic purpose, must try harder to expand the size of the liberal audience it provides to advertisers through “free” content. A key strategy for doing that has been expansion into the US market.
In 2012, the Guardian hired Joshua Treviño, a man who openly called for the murder of Alice Walker and other Gaza flotilla activists, as part of its drive to expand into the USA by offering a “plurality of views”. Maybe that particular outrage would not have happened had Katharine Viner been editor-in-chief at the time. But the need to bring in ad revenue will always bring tremendous pressure to signal to corporate advertisers that “we’re really not that different from the others”. If a newspaper loses a handful of subscribers it won’t even notice. Lose a handful of its top advertisers and it will scramble. Advertiser clout may have made the Guardian ignore a major scandal involving the HSBC.
In February a Guardian editorial complained that the UK is not dropping enough bombs on countries the UK has already helped destroy. The UK’s “contribution” to “rolling back ISIS”, which US/UK barbarism did so much to create, has been “an average of less than one air strike per day” which the editors found unacceptably “modest”. In the same editorial, they expressed disappointed that the UK was not taking more of the lead inflaming the new Cold War with Russia. They approvingly noted that the British public “regards Russia as the chief international threat to stability.” In another piece, the Guardian’s in house lunatic, Timothy Garton Ash, aggressively pushed for World War III. Will Viner counter any of this insanity?
Will Katherine Viner take any interest in what the British public actually knows, or thinks it does, because of her newspaper’s international coverage? As of 2013, fifty nine per cent in the UK believed that fewer than 10,000 Iraqis died as a result of the war that began in 2003 – one that actually killed half a million, and quite possibly many more than that. How many Guardian readers will be aware of what Russian studies scholar Stephen Cohen observed – that there is more criticism of Putin in Russia’s print media than there is of Obama in US newspapers?
John Hilley asks if Viner will “exert any serious check on Jonathan Freedland as effective gatekeeper of the paper’s lame, apologist editorial position on Israel-Palestine?”
I wonder if Viner will, at the very least, reverse the “coup” on its comment pages as Tariq Ali, a former Guardian regular, described it last year. Would Viner have allowed one dishonest and reactionary reporter to have supplied 75% of the Guardian’s Venezuela coverage over several years? And, mind you, that was before the “coup” made the Guardian even more reactionary.
Frankly, I doubt the Guardian will get much better under Viner because, regardless of her personal preferences, the ad revenue must come in. The Guardian has been struggling because of lost ad revenue. If she isn’t politically timid enough, she won’t keep her job. A lot of timidity won’t even be required if Viner doesn’t read much outside the liberal press. She’ll remain blissfully unaware of many huge problems with her newspaper’s coverage.
We urgently need a mass media that does not chase after ad revenue or well off subscribers. Anyone familiar with the elite serving output of the BBC (or CBC) will, understandably, tend to scoff at the idea that government ownership or government funding is a big part of the solution. That’s extremely unfortunate, a foolish concession to the right wing ideology that we’ve all been force fed. As I argued here, it’s easy to envision basic reforms that could democratize public media such that it retains independence from both the government of the day and corporate power. Winning reform is another matter. If that were easy to do, it would have been done decades ago.
Media Lens has suggested that the Left’s most prominent writers should boycott the corporate media and team up to establish an outlet that is completely funded by readers. I see a few problems with this idea, but at least it is an idea for getting beyond the disastrous status quo.
1) Surviving isn’t enough. A real challenge to the corporate press, in particular to its liberal faction, means reaching people who are not of the Left. That requires serious resources which, thanks to wealth and income inequality, most of the general public does not have.
2) Even with the most prominent leftists boycotting, the corporate media will be able to entice other writers to provide a token left presence – enough to undercut support for independent media.
It will take quite a battle, but the elite stranglehold on public debate must be broken because it endangers us all.
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