Guardian sheds journalists, but comment remains free
Francis Sedgemore, Friday 3 July 2009
Taking voluntary redundancy:
- Audrey Gillan – foreign correspondent
- Duncan Campbell – senior correspondent/crime specialist
- David Hencke – Westminster correspondent
Recently departed:
- David Pallister – investigative reporter
- Ian Wylie – editor of Work & Graduate supplement
With a dearth of genuine news reporting (i.e., proper journalism), what will the Grauniad’s ever expanding army of columnists and pro-bloggers have to write about?
Feed the writer! 
Friday 3 July 2009 at 12:50 UTC
“what will the Grauniad’s ever expanding army of columnists and pro-bloggers have to write about?”
Each other?
Friday 3 July 2009 at 12:56 UTC
That goes without saying. Many of said scribblers are followers of Narcissus, who disdains those who love him, and adores himself alone. But will they perish like their hero?
Friday 3 July 2009 at 19:30 UTC
Did you ever read the sage of Toronto, M Mcluhan on Narcisssus? He reckons most of us got that story wrong…… That said, by and large you are right about the Guardian. They call it Comment is FREE. Remember the line in Comedians? If you are giving it away, it ain’t worth having.
Friday 3 July 2009 at 20:22 UTC
For a person like myself the loss of people like Campbell have made it harder to gain help in the fight to clear the innocent in prison.
But well done for willing to fight the corner of the innocent.
Saturday 4 July 2009 at 00:12 UTC
The departure of every one of them is a loss when it comes to the journalistic integrity of the Groan.
Saturday 4 July 2009 at 00:20 UTC
Mcluhan’s take on the Narcissus myth is pure po-mo contrarianism. “Autoamputation”, “servomechanisms”,… bollocks.
Saturday 4 July 2009 at 08:19 UTC
McLuhan’s take on Narcissus was actually very straightforward. It was simply that because (in his view – I don’t know if he was right) the Greeks didn’t have mirrors, Narcissus genuinely didn’t know that the beautiful creature he had fallen for was really himself. On the other hand, most Narcissists today do have mirrors. Neologisms equals postmodernism? Its a point of view I suppose. I wonder if you aren’t falling into one of the traps many commentators – like Dwight Macdonald – have fallen into when dealing with McLuhan, who is often taken as advocating the exact opposite of what he was actually saying.
Saturday 4 July 2009 at 13:07 UTC
If a bird can recognise its reflection in a window or pool, then those human beings of old who built great libraries and spent their lives philosophising surely understood the concept of a mirror. The po-mo reference is to McLuhan’s abuse of technical, modernist language to illustrate what seems to me to be a vacuous argument. If I’ve misunderstood McLuhan, then maybe McLuhan has failed to make himself sufficiently clear.
Saturday 4 July 2009 at 13:18 UTC
Yeah, well he was a literature professor (in the days before postmodernism – if memory serves he didn’t rate what he read of some of the more popular French/Belgian thinkers of that ilk) and he was commenting on a legend, that might just have had an other than literal meaning. (Cf his point about sowing Dragon’s teeth and alphabets. I don’t think he actually believed that there really were Dragons that had teeth.) Or was Narcissus a real person who actually lived etc?
Monday 6 July 2009 at 14:05 UTC
OK. Forget Marshall McLuhan. Did you hear the chief exec of the Guardian on the Evan Davies business show on Radio 4, saturday tea time? She was talking about how people buy the Guardian for the quality of its journalism. I guess that she was talking about Seamus Milne.
Monday 6 July 2009 at 14:10 UTC
“She was talking about how people buy the Guardian for the quality of its journalism.”
And here’s me thinking it was because of the Grauniad’s world famous wall charts on the wines of Tuscany.
Tuesday 7 July 2009 at 13:39 UTC
No, you are thinking of its Spansih phrasebooks, which contribute to society by dropping out of the paper and providing work for street cleaners.
Tuesday 7 July 2009 at 13:42 UTC
Is the provision of *Spanish* phrasebooks indicative of the credit crunch’s impact on Grauniadistas?
Tuesday 7 July 2009 at 16:20 UTC
In an ideal world they’d open them and find that they were actually Italian phrasebooks and that Spanish was a misprint. Re the credit crunch etc – dunno. But they were like autumn leaves on the pavements near the University in manchester today.
Sunday 12 July 2009 at 11:58 UTC
I see that the Grauniad has just published an Italian phrasebook. Phew! Recession over.