A wild ‘no one tells me what to write’

Your update on a rather common bit of hack self-deception.

Previously: Contempt

Programming note: I am getting better and had the tests for type 1 diabetes today but the newsletters may be shorter than usual for a while as I get my energy back. Thank you for your kind messages and support.

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*Bang* and out of nowhere a wild “no one tells me what to write” appears. It’s an organic, free-range specimen strolling through the fields of David Aaronovitch’s newsletter. Remember him? Easily duped into buying a fake leather jacket or a ginned-up case for war, he’s just finished up 18 years as a columnist for The Times (proprietor: Mr. Keith Rupert Murdoch). Released from his custom-built habitat and allowed to roam over to Substack. Free at last! Free at last! A columnist finally allowed to write what he likes despite always implying that no one told him what to write. Now no one tells him what to write.

In the introduction to the latest edition of his grandly titled Notes From The Underground newsletter, Aaronovitch writes:

But first, I am not sure I could have published this in The Times, where I worked for nearly 18 years up until the end of February. I’ll talk more about the far-from-terrible-but-complicated business of being a Murdoch employee on here another time. Some aspects of this new freedom are exhilarating. Others are trickier - like earning a living to keep on writing. So if you can afford to become a paid subscriber (there are extra benefits, I promise) please, please do. If you can’t, your unpaid subscription is valuable too.

David, David, David, we over here in the tin cup rattling world of Substack try to do our begging with a little more class (see the end of this edition).

The “far-from-terrible-but-complicated business of being a Murdoch employee” is presented as fine and dandy while columnists are on the payroll. The game then is to say that Murdoch isn’t even a factor in their thinking, that the old Chomsky line about not even getting the job if you posed any risk of saying something out of line is conspiracist grumbling.

In December 2019, trying to dunk on the Telegraph’s tame former Labour MP, Tom Harris, one of the most pathetic columnists in Britain, Aaronovitch tweeted:

I’m sorry that you haven’t read any one of the several articles I’ve written since the referendum. At The Times (unlike The Telegraph, clearly) we get to write about what we want to write about. One day you may be allowed to tell us about your view of Johnson. 

The free-range Aaronovitch admits something different; his latest newsletter is on Fox News and he is “not sure” he would have been able to publish it in The Times. That’s playing cute: He knows damn well that any critical column on another part of the News Corp empire would have been spiked faster than a heretic’s head in the middle ages.

I’m not for a moment pretending that it’s surprising that columnists working at major newspapers operate within restrictions. If you are within a corporation, you are subject to corporate culture, and at a newspaper, you are ultimately subordinate to the requirements of the editor and the whims of the proprietor. It is not necessary for Rupert Murdoch to descend upon the newsroom like an antipodean ring wraith for any given employee to know what isn’t permissible.

The problem comes when newspaper employees, particularly columnists, play the “no one tells me what to write” game. It is literally untrue: The topic of any column can be vetoed by the comment desk or rejected by some more senior exec. But it is also philosophically untrue. Newspapers have editorial lines that are expressed both explicitly — in meetings and via leader columns (the collective voice of the paper) — and implicitly — via unspoken ‘culture’ and a certain kind of ‘heavy manners’ vibes-based management.

In 2018, during one of the British press’ periodic ragers provoked by Owen Jones noting that too many people in the industry went to private school — tick for me — and went to Oxbridge — tick number two for me¹ — Aaronovitch snarled at Jones:

You may have "worked in media", but you have never put a deliberate gap between your own opinions and what you write. You are a very effective pamphleteer, not a journalist and that's why you're an exception.

The Substack Aaronovitch is purporting to provide a new honesty, an honesty that News UK Aaronovitch previously claimed to be providing. It goes back to an earlier edition of this newsletter (‘Contempt’) and the casual way in which a lot of hacks exploit their readers’ trust. What Aaronovitch is telling his readers now — the people he is begging to subscribe — is that finally “no one tells [him] what to write” but why should they believe that the emperor is really wearing clothes this time?

Last week, to ‘celebrate’ 110 years of its existence, The New Statesman gathered six of its former political editors/political writers for a round table. The topic of “no one tells me what to write” came up:

Andrew Marr: I think what unites us is that nobody told or tells us what to write.

Steve Richards: My period was the early New Labour period. Ian Hargreaves, the editor, wanted two things that were slightly contradictory. He wanted us to find out what was happening behind the scenes of this project. And he also wanted scoops and exclusives, which pissed off the very people that you needed to get behind the scenes. That was the never-ending dilemma.

Look at the dissonance there: Marr — the recipient of Chomsky’s disdain all those years ago — still claiming to be independent and then, in the next breath, Richards explaining that Ian Hargreaves absolutely told him what to write. That is what editors do ultimately; some with a light touch and others with a heavy hand. Writers and columnists with staff contracts who claim that their output is entirely independent and unshaped by wider editorial concerns and/or the capriciousness of their editors are either kidding themselves or lying to you.

In a 2017 Guardian web chat, while he was still at the BBC, Marr gave a belated response to Chomsky’s criticisms of the cowardly kind you can deliver when the critic is no longer sitting in front of you:

I remember this interview very well. I was – quite rightly – nervous of Chomsky, who is a formidable intellect. When he suggested that "if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting", I immediately realised that this was not so much brilliant, as unanswerable. He comes quite close to the position that the propaganda model means "everybody who disagrees with me". And the conversation was taking place in the context of me expressing disbelief, in his view, that all mainstream journalists were essentially the same - I had said that it seemed to me the Guardian and the Telegraph posed very different world views. And that journalists varied hugely in their own politics and temperament. He is brilliant, but he is a brilliant conspiracist, so therefore no, it wasn't a matter of the proverbial penny dropping, still less an epiphany.

The gap in the world views of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph is the narcissism of small differences but Marr could never and will never realise that. It is not in his professional interest, even as we see hacks move from Mirror to Guardian to Daily Mail to Telegraph to Sun and so on, in a dizzying array of ideological shifting. Marr dismisses Chomsky as a mere — if “brilliant” — “conspiracist” because, as he himself admits, the academic’s argument was “unanswerable”. That is because it summed up a truth:

It doesn’t matter that “no one tells you what to write” if you know implicitly what they would tell you, and stay within the lines to ensure your fee keeps coming.

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1. My usual caveat here: No one in my family had been to any university before me.