I, Columnist

Nick Cohen's bullsh*t exit from The Observer and hype about AI articles reveal similar unpleasant realities about columnists and columns.

Dicitur etiam meditatus edictum, quo veniam daret flatum crepitumque ventris in convivio emittendi, cum periclitatum qvendam prae pudore ex continentia repperisset.

[He is even said to have considered passing an edict, by which he would give license to farting at dinner, because he had heard of a man who had nearly killed himself by holding it in for shame.] 

— Divus Claudius 32, Suetonius.

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Emperor Claudius was a columnist; he issued up to twenty edicts a day on a range of topics, regardless of whether he knew what he was talking about. Suetonius — the Dominic Sandbrook of his era — claims that one of those commandments was on the subject of public flatulence but it’s likely that he was just repeating a dinner party joke, 80 years after the fact.

In our era, the public flatulence of columnists is presented to us every day in the press and on the airwaves; the soggy, stuttering evacuation of half-digested ideas and stinking assumptions Jackson Pollocked all over public debate. Columnists praise each other loudly on social media for the brilliance of their farts; they receive awards for their volume and stench; and even in disgrace they are protected and lauded.

The official line on the end of Nick Cohen’s tenure at The Observer is that he “resigned for health reasons”. The statement does not specify whose health the resignation is intended to protect. It was accompanied by this slobbering tribute from The Observer editor Paul Webster:

Nick Cohen has been a brilliant columnist whose incisive, emphatic writing has been a big part of the Observer for more than 20 years. On behalf of Observer colleagues, I’d like to thank him for his service and wish him all the best as he moves on to new opportunities.

As the author Jean Hannah Edelstein wrote on Twitter:

How many young women gave up hope of being described as brilliant and incisive because of the culture at this newspaper? 

The very next line of the Press Gazette story after Webster’s tribute to Cohen reads:

His departure follows an investigation over a number of complaints about Cohen’s behaviour in the office made by former female colleagues.

Allegations about Cohen’s conduct — which he called “vile and untrue” in a legal letter written in 2020 — had been circulated for years, leading to him being referred to as “the octopus”. In July 2022, Jolyon Maugham KC posted on Twitter that he…

… [had] in my possession some relatively recent screenshots in which Nick Cohen offers to go to the toilet at the newsroom at the Observer, strip off, take a naked photo of himself and send it to a junior female freelancer.

Nick Cohen initally told me in an email that the above is “just not true.” He later said “I cannot comment until you give me basic details and context rather than anonymous claims.”

The woman, (W1), declined and their working relationship broke down. W1 believes she paid a very high personal price for his actions and is fearful of speaking out publicly. She is afraid of both the personal and professional consequences of speaking out.

She and another woman (W2) separately made initial approaches about Nick Cohen’s conduct to Guardian News and Media (GNM), W2 directly to a very senior executive. W2 reported having been groped by Cohen at the Observer’s offices.

The writer and presenter Lucy Siegle subsequently identified herself as Woman 2. She wrote in The New European in August 2022:

It was during this time as an admin assistant [on The Observer Magazine] that I was assaulted by Nick Cohen, a prominent and highly-regarded journalist and, until this week when his column was “paused” as he is investigated by the company, still a star columnist on The Observer, as well as other publications including The Spectator and Private Eye. 

For clarity, while I didn’t think the assault was serious sexual assault, it was alarming, deliberate and made me extremely uncomfortable. It was not a brush pass, an arse slap or anything that can be thought of as high jinks. It was a deliberate and serious grope.

Years later, in 2018, after having been told that a “weird” complaint about Nick Cohen has been dismissed as “not credible”, Siegle — by then an Observer columnist herself — contacted management to tell them about what she had experienced. She writes of meeting with a Guardian News & Media executive who’d managed her in the past:

I described why I was there, and went on to tell the senior executive about Nick Cohen’s assault on me. There was not much response at this point, just a blank stare which I felt to be slightly hostile. But when I mentioned that I was aware there had been another allegation, the senior executive became animated. 

They set me straight (“That sort of Twitter allegation would not be investigated in that way ever…”) and pulled a face of disgust at the very idea of that allegation. The executive also denied any knowledge about any allegation. 

The meeting continued and the exec pointed out a number of times that it would be difficult for me to proceed with my complaint anonymously and made it sound as if I will have to go head-to-head with “Nick”. He was called by his first name throughout, and there was lengthy speculation from the exec about what he might say and how he might be affected by such an allegation.

“He might not remember anything, he might not know who you are!” the exec announced.

I was at a loss to know why this was said or what it means. I tried to make the point about MeToo and the Observer’s reputation, which was very important to me. At this point, the exec almost jumped out of their chair. “You’re going to write about it?” The exec seemed very concerned about this possibility.

I say, “no I didn’t say that”.

The exec then told me that Nick Cohen was frequently targeted for abuse because of his political standpoint. They sounded like they were defending a very precious asset, their star striker. I could not understand why this was remotely relevant, but my brain began to compute that this conversation was not welcome.

By this time I also held some relative status on the paper. I had a readership, I had some profile from my TV work too. But if I was being treated in this way and my concerns minimised (as I believe they were), then what has haunted me ever since is wondering how someone who was less of a fixture would have got on? What chance would an intern or an admin (as I once was) have had of making an allegation against a powerful male? How would she be heard and supported?

Two days before Siegle’s article came out, Press Gazette reported Cohen’s column was to be “paused while he [co-operated with] the company’s internal investigation.” Cohen continued to be commissioned and published by The Critic and The Spectator, and launched a Substack in November.

Today’s Press Gazette story simply states:

[Cohen’s] last weekly Observer column appeared in July 2022 and the internal investigation has now concluded.

Responding to the publication’s enquiries in August, Cohen said he could not make a statement until the investigation had ended. It has now ended and he’s silent on the subject; this must be the first time in at least 50 years that Nick Cohen has not had an opinion on something.

But while the Press Gazette piece is free of words on the subject from Cohen, it found space for the thoughts of anonymous but animated Observer ‘insiders’:

Despite the complaints, one Observer insider said they were “mystified” and “sad” about the manner of Cohen’s departure... 

...One insider said that their experience of working with Cohen did not tally with the allgeations aired about him. 

The second quote has been removed from the story — without an update — after Siegle complained on Twitter. Dominic Ponsford, Press Gazette’s editor, who was bylined on the story, said:

Hi Lucy — felt I needed to ask what insiders at The Observer felt about this and duty to report, but on balance, I’ve taken the line out. It feels like false equivalence and can see how those who have made complaints could draw offence. 

Siegle, with far more grace than I could ever show, replied:

I’m glad for that. If an insider did have issues do you think they’d necessarily feel cool sharing it with you? Given the editor is giving him a good old slapsies on the back ‘on behalf of Observer colleagues’ 

Press Gazette included Siegle’s name in its original tweet promoting the story. There is no reason whatsoever to put the name of someone who has spoken out about an alleged assault alongside that of their alleged assailant in a promotional tweet. It’s the Twitter equivalent of shouting headlines through their letterbox.

The only quote from Cohen in the news story is taken from his Substack newsletter and is his vainglorious explanation of why it exists:

There are millions of people who reject right-wing authoritarian populism and the left’s insistence on ideological conformism. This newsletter is for them.

The Press Gazette report ends like this:

It costs £6 per month and according to Substack has hundreds of paid subscribers. Cohen also writes regularly for The Spectator.

That’s a free advert.

As well as his columns under his own name for The Observer, The Spectator and elsewhere, Cohen was, for many years, a purveyor of media stories from behind the pseudonym “Ratbiter” in Private Eye. His relationship with the Eye may explain why it has had so little to say about The Observer ‘situation’, though I suspect its next issue will be the vessel for some kind of response.

Wagons have been circled in Cohen’s defence. His Substack announcement was greeted by lots of cheerful support from other prominent journalists and few have said anything publicly about The Observer investigation or the allegations against him. In WhatsApp threads, Facebook Messenger conversations and Twitter DMs, there is a different picture. One editor told me:

I think we should all be upfront [about these things]. X was a terrible groper. He’s really sorry about it now. His wife is sorrier. 

Several newspaper insiders — see, we can all play that game — have told me there are other columnists who are worse than Cohen is alleged to have been.

Columnists who write endlessly about protecting women have said nothing; writers who pitch themselves as frank and fearless have skittered away from the threat of an awkward moment in the pub or across the table at a dinner party. The Observer will act as though this situation is resolved and put its ‘investigation’ — to borrow from Douglas Adams — “at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard.”

Not only will Nick Cohen continue to be paid for his flatulence, but he’ll continue to be lauded for it and granted status for it; after all, he’s a brilliant, incisive, and emphatic farter, whose blasts have been heard for decades. It’s unthinkable that he might have to splatter the walls in obscurity.

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The status of columnists — young and old, famous and infamous — has been a ripe topic for columnists and their watchers this week. In The New Yorker, a profile of The New York Times op-ed writer and former Books Review editor Pamela Paul lured her into a trap where she honked away about her writing ‘rules’:

Pamela Paul and I met twice, in the same Times conference room, and on both occasions, she wore a black biker jacket. She paired it with soft skirts in floral print or pink stripes: a look to suit a provocateur temperamentally averse to provocation. “A kind of writing that I don’t like to do myself is deliberately contrarian writing—like, people who are just pushing buttons and testing waters,” she told me. “That’s not my way. To my mind, the role and responsibility of a columnist is to always write what you think.”

Yet, since stepping down as editor of the Times Book Review to become an opinion columnist, early last year, Paul has produced a body of work—deliberately contrarian or not—that reliably results in buttons being pushed. Her inaugural column, “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience,’ ” took up the question of who has “the right” to address culturally specific subject matter. For example: “Am I, as a new columnist for the Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?” Paul wrote. “Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture—docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts.” One representative response, by the press critic Dan Froomkin, read, “Wow. New @nytopinion columnist comes out of the gates with a straw-man panic attack on wokeism. Just what the place didn’t need.” 

Paul is an example of a common columnist variant: The contrarian who pretends they are absolutely not a contrarian. Later in the piece, she drops a classic columnist line — a version of “no, it is the children who are wrong” — directed at her own readers:

Discussing the reception of her columns, Paul told me that she’s sometimes disappointed by readers’ failure to recognize humor. “There was this one instance where I wrote a piece looking at the downside of losing masks, and I said, ‘Without having masks, you’re not going to be able to politically pigeonhole people in five seconds or less,’ ” she recalled. “Some people were, like, ‘I think it’s really wrong to politically pigeonhole people.’ ” She attributes this disconnect to the tenor of public discourse: “Our moment is so humorless,” she said…

… humourlessly.

The whole piece is worth reading because the writer, Molly Fischer, expertly offers Paul lots of rope and quietly manages to persuade her it’s a fetching necklace. Once you’ve done that, read Max Read's open editor's notes on a recent Paul column which expertly dissect her egotism and identify her mile-wide blindspots.

After I read Max’s piece, I was sorely tempted to do the same thing to the latest column by frequent newsletter bête noire James Marriott. Under the headline, AI spells trouble for creatives — about time too, which he would fervently remind you he didn’t write, Marriott muses:

In computing, Moravec’s paradox states that the things people find easy, AI finds difficult; and the things AI finds easy, people find difficult. It makes an interesting nonsense of our established categories of value. Fine motor skills challenge AI. For a robot to walk into a room and pick up all the dirty mugs counts as a remarkable achievement (actually, for me too). But a series of “oil sketches” in the style of Singer Sargent, such as the ones I recently requested from the AI software Dall-E 2, is the work of seconds — and the results not much inferior to the minor works of the master himself. Graphic designers may be more vulnerable to automation than cleaners... 

Art, the platitude runs, “is what makes us human”. We justify human value in terms of creativity. In his book on AI, the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy calls humans “the organism driven to create”. In certain liberal circles one would hesitate to contradict the idea that everyone has a novel in them or that all children are natural artists. But some people are not creative. Many are significantly less creative than an AI. This is fine. It does not diminish their worth.

Our exaggerated reverence for the creative impulse derives from the romantics of the early 19th century. The twilight of religion required new justifications for the cosmic specialness of humans. If we are not made in God’s image, what is it about us that is divine? The answer was that the artist’s creation of sublime paintings or poetry put him in touch with the numinous. Versions of this idea can be found everywhere, from Coleridge to Schopenhauer. This belief in the spiritual superiority of artists filtered through from intellectual bohemia to the upper middle classes, and by the mid 20th century social prestige practically required at least an attempted aura of artiness.

Now, quite banal instances of human creativity are preposterously overvalued. Witness the often conceited superiority of those in only tangentially creative professions. Why should a newspaper columnist or an advertising copywriter feel himself to be more interesting than a banker or a cleaner? I have lawyer friends who complain of the rictus countenances and slipping eye-contact they get from artistic types at parties. But I know those parties. And I know my lawyers are the most interesting people in the room.

I know ChatGPT can already write more convincing versions of those superficial ideas about the effect of AI on creativity; I’ve also read this trite handwringing mixed with glee churned out by at least five other columnists. Do I need to train as a Blade Runner? Are these chuckling poltroons replicants walking among us? No, they just demonstrate the same level of imagination as a deceptively impressive machine-learning demo, i.e. none.

AI produces travesties and burlesques of news stories, paintings, and songs. It chomps up existing material and refashions it in ‘convincing’ ways (as long as you don’t mind a few extra fingers). Yes, it will get better and better but the idea that human creativity is done is the conclusion of a dull mind. Saying, “some people are not creative” is a sign of the same dullness; everyone is creative, it’s just that the usefulness, focus, and perceived aesthetic value of that creativity varies wildly.

When a columnist like Marriott talks about “our exaggerated reverence for the creative impulse” or implies that ‘we’ all "feel… more interesting than a banker or a cleaner”, they are talking into the mirror, whatever their protestations. “I know my lawyers are the most interesting people in the room,” sounds like the claim of a man with a fetish for the legal profession (no kink shaming).

Marriott’s acceptance that “AI can write news stories” in the week that CNET’s experiment with that idea produced vast amounts of plagiarism and promoted multiple corrections and Jonah Peretti, one of the media’s most immoral monsters, teamed up with ChatGPT to produce BuzzFeed quizzes, is cowardice and capitulation. His conclusion that “[AI] can produce paintings of startling and eerie beauty” is a red flag against his taste as a professional critic and a clue that he would be a promising Three-card monte mark.

Bad columnists already feel algorithmic. Bad columnists are already tools for their proprietors, pumping out bad takes that fit the company and editorial lines as though the comment editor is simply plugging in prompts. Bad columnists — hey Nick! — are already a danger to society. Every journalist gushing about the opportunities of AI journalism in Vanity Fair’s article this week came over like a cross between Marshal Pétain and a Judas goat to me.

A future filled with soulless AI ‘articles’ is no more inevitable than one where monsters can be columnists and never face a reckoning. These are choices and you can see exactly who is making them.

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Thanks to Dr Kate Devlin, Fancywookie, AJMcKenna and Ralph for reading today’s draft. If you liked this issue, please hit the button below:

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It’s my birthday tomorrow so expect the recommendations email on Sunday.