I write a lot about things you probably shouldn’t read — I read them so you don’t have to — but it’s worth saying what’s good now and then. This is another edition of the (semi-) regular recommendations series.
1. Nick Davies, Peter Jukes, Roy Greenslade and more on ‘the Murdoch factor’
Various, Press Gazette (September 2023)
There is an evil twin article to this in Press Gazette where admirers and former employees of Murdoch (often the same people) praise him, but I prefer this one, obviously:
Nick Davies:
“Murdoch is a man of average intelligence, certainly not wise, and with no special insight into anything important. But he is outstandingly greedy, and his gluttonous appetite for money has forced him to develop the quality which he needed to succeed – an utterly amoral ruthlessness.
He likes to say he is a journalist. He isn’t. A journalist tries to tell the truth about the world… Rupert Murdoch has trampled on the truth, undermined governments, distorted policy, left a legacy of chaos while stuffing his pockets with cash.
There are plenty of lickspittle hacks who have taken his pieces of silver and who will try to excuse their own collusion by pretending he is a force for good. The truth contradicts them.”
2. Press freedom means controlling the language of AI
Mike Annanny and Jake Carr for NiemanLab (September 2023)
This is a fairly long and involved piece but a good one to read if you’re interested in the growing temptation in media organisations to turn to generative AI for cheap copy:
But GenAI language has no such commitment to the truth, eloquence, or the public interest. GenAI systems use statistical models to guess which word orders and pixel placements fit patterns that computational models have identified in vast and largely unexamined datasets. They act like “stochastic parrots.” Journalism that uses the large language models and statistical patterns of Big Tech’s GenAI runs the risk of being not just biased or boring. Such journalism is potentially anathema to a free press because it surrenders the autonomy — not to mention aesthetic joy — that comes from knowing why and how to use language.
3. Rodney Mullen Explains How the Tony Hawk Games Changed His Life
Nat Kassel for Vice (August 2020)
I love Rodney Mullen. He’s a genius on a skateboard and a really interesting thinker and human being when he’s not on one.
I’m out there skating the picnic table and then these dudes come up and they’re huge. I remember the one dude just walked up and lay right on the table and I’m like, “Great.” Then the other dude walked up and they just looked so hard, like straight outta jail. There’s nothing you can do, you’re at their mercy and so you’re nervous. I said something and the guy’s whole body language changed. He turned from this menacing guy to like a kid, the way he moved, because ultimately, they’re still like 19 or 20 [laughs]. Then he turned and was like, “You’re that guy! I play you!” And then he started to rattle off the trick names. I went from seriously being afraid and within 30 seconds he’s talking about dark slides and casper slides. I just remember thinking, “Thank god for this video game.”
4. Freedom of the Press and the Working Class
Leon Trotsky for Clave (August 1938)
Since we’re once again having a tedious, tendentious, and totally ludicrous debate on press freedom following Laurence Fox’s disgusting comments, let’s jump back to this essay from 85 years ago:
The real tasks of the workers’ state do not consist in policing public opinion, but in freeing it from the yoke of capital. This can only be done by placing the means of production – which includes the production of information – in the hands of society in its entirety. Once this essential step towards socialism has been taken, all currents of opinion which have not taken arms against the dictatorship of the proletariat must be able to express themselves freely. It is the duty of the workers’ state to put in their hands, to all according to their numeric importance, the technical means necessary for this, printing presses, paper, means of transportation. One of the principal causes of the degeneration of the state machine is the monopolisation of the press by the Stalinist bureaucracy which risks to transform all the gains of the October revolution to a pile of ruins.
5. Masthead Gladiators at the New York Times
Shawn McCreesh for New York Magazine, Intelligencer
I’m looking forward to reading Adam Nagourney’s new book The Times, about the internal workings of the New York Times over the past 50 years. This piece from New York magazine’s Intelligencer vertical is a good preview:
[Nagourney] begins with Abe Rosenthal’s appointment as executive editor in 1977. The editors back then behaved like Greek gods, acting on whims, driven by gigantic egos and petty feuds, indifferent to the harm done to the mortals below. Rosenthal was like Zeus, hurling thunderbolts, confident of his aim (there was no Slack back talk or employee tweetstorms on Mount Olympus). “You could really punish people then,” says Nagourney. He documents how vengeful editors would banish reporters or rivals who crossed them, sticking them with far-flung assignments or dead-end beats. (This absolutely still happens there, though to a lesser degree.) Each various executive editor had his or her court of loyalists, but there’s treachery on every other page, and the book reads like an internal affairs report at points.
I wonder how much has really changed, and what it is about the Times that drives people mad — or is it that one must be mad in order to ascend there? “There’s an old line,” says Nagourney of those on the editor track, “that no one’s career at the Times ever ends well. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It’s always been an up-and-out kind of place. You keep moving up, and if you don’t succeed, you’re out … That’s part of the culture of the place. It doesn’t strike me as tough and mean a culture now as it was 20 years ago.”
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6. Dave Portnoy’s Sausage Fest:
A rain-soaked afternoon eating pizza with the Stoolies.
Ezra Marcus for Grub Street (September 2023)
A good report on a bad food festival:
In the weeks leading up to the festival, Portnoy’s pizza reviews — arguably the most successful series of YouTube food reviews ever, and certainly the apex of the pizza category — started growing friskier. For years, the reviews generally steered clear of the no-holds-barred culture-war brawling that otherwise defined Portnoy’s ascent. (In his 2018 Best Pizza review, for example, he is inexplicably joined by a pair of baby goats, which he nuzzles throughout the clip.) But on August 17, Portnoy posted a review of Funzi’s Pizzeria on St. Marks.
“You know who was in here the other day? Kenji Alt, who’s one of the great asshole scumbag coward pieces of shit who ever lived,” said Portnoy, referring to J. Kenji López-Alt, the recipe developer and best-selling cookbook author. Portnoy was angry about an Instagram Story López-Alt posted with an image of his pizza festival flyer: “If there’s one good thing @stoolpresidente has done, it’s put together this list of pizzerias who are either not aware of his history of sexual abuse, or know but don’t care.” López-Alt warned attendees that they could be in for subpar slices: “It’s hard to make good food in a festival setting period. Making good pizza without your actual ovens? Good luck.”
7. Lynn Barber interview: ‘Being untactful comes naturally to me’
William Turvill for Press Gazette (April 2023)
I’m (hopefully1) interviewing the incredible interviewer Lynn Barber for my book and this piece came up during my research:
Barber is not one to pull punches. Harriet Harman? “Thick.” Chris Evans? “Smug git.” Martin Clunes? “Bitter.” Barber’s list of skin-crawlingly awkward interviews goes on. “Being untactful comes naturally to me,” Barber explained when I asked how she dealt with awkward moments in interviews. “Obviously I try to be polite. But no, the fact is I wouldn’t say, either as a writer or a person, does tact feature in my life. I tend to be quite blunt.”
Why? “God. Well. My father was the rudest person I’ve ever met in my life. He was just outright rude to everyone the whole time. And so, I suppose, I’m just used to that. I suppose I don’t go out of my way to be untactful. I’m just trying to think – when I interviewed Harriet Harman, I asked her: ‘Are you thick?’ – because somebody said she was thick. Whereas another interviewer would say: ‘How would you rate your intellectual prowess?’ I cut to the chase, as it were.”
8. Keep Taking the Tabloids
Nigel Holtby for Phaze 1 (January 1989)
Another article from my book research; this time it’s a blast from the past that feels very different with hindsight — the editors of NME and Melody Maker talking about the state of music magazines at the tail-end of the 80s:
While Alan Lewis might sound pessimistic, the 'NME' has recently produced its biggest issue (76 pages) since 1981, and with 95,000 copies changing hands every week, is still the best-selling music paper in Britain. It appears to have recovered from a period when it personified the ills of this country's music press, raving over rare and obscure acts and pouring scorn on commercial success. Not only that, but when Lewis took over as editor a year ago, he inherited a paper that was losing sight of its basis as a music medium, and increasingly being drawn into other fields.
"They had Neil Kinnock on the cover twice and I think that was dangerous and silly", he says. "There were periods where the writers went too far and were terribly destructive, and some weeks you wondered why they were in the business at all, because they didn't seem to like anything very much. That did the paper a lot of harm... it became ultra-elitist."
9. Rickie Lambert, conspiracy theories – and why footballers are vulnerable
Simon Hughes for The Athletic (September 2023)
This is a long and brilliantly researched and reported article; conspiracist footballers go back a long way now — hello, David Icke — but the internet has super-charged them as a phenomenon:
“Clean eating became a fad 10 years ago or so,” the psychologist says when asked to explain what can happen when sportspeople embrace alternative thinking. “That quickly becomes, ‘Don’t trust the professionals — take charge of what you put into your body.’ This then becomes, ‘Don’t trust the professionals — they are in the pockets of ‘big pharma’’. You throw in a pandemic in the middle of all this, along with various high-profile political scandals, and suddenly it manifests into not trusting anyone, claims about who controls the planet, and extreme views such as antisemitism.”
10. ‘Lachlan Murdoch is a Hamlet figure’: Michael Wolff unpicks the real-life succession drama
Zoe Williams for The Guardian
We started with Murdoch, so let’s end with him. This is not a flawless piece — it doesn’t reckon with the dubiousness of some of Wolff’s claims and sources — but it’s still an interesting read:
Obviously, it’s hard to even consider the Murdochs now but through the lens of Succession. Which one’s meant to be Kendall again, and did he win? “The superstructure of Succession takes a lot from the Murdoch story,” Wolff says. “But the Murdochs really don’t figure into any of the characters in an exact way. In no way. They aren’t those people. Murdoch, in the flesh, is incredibly conflict-averse. Never engages. Very courtly. Very polite. In person, not in the least bit bullying or demanding or even functionally a know-it-all.” (According to The Fall, James Murdoch is “a prick”. I liked the brevity.)
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It’s agreed, I just have to get hold of her on her landline!
Good to see your salute to Nick Davies. If journalism had an aristocracy he would be a prince, up there with Paul Foot, Harold Evans, James Cameron. Still often dip into my worn copy of his brilliant Hack Attack. Only misgiving is the notion that the truth ‘caught up’ with Murdoch. It may have done, but he’s sailed on serenely, his lickspittles still toiling without cease to make the world a worse place.
Interesting: the assessment of Murdoch in private dovetails directly with what Ali Campbell felt when he met him and what he was told by peers. As for succession? Hmmm...I hear this several ways but Game of Thrones sounds more plausible among the children to me given what I’ve seen, which, admittedly, is minimal. My experience of family successors suggests that they’re a shadow of their parents’ capabilities but heh - who knows until it really happens. And for that, Murdoch needs to push up daisies.