A Heartbreaking Blog of Staggering Genius

British journalism has features I’m not quite comfortable with. Take, for example, the tendency to diss competing news sources. Now that is nothing we all hadn’t seen before. Many columnists spend their lives bitching about how stupid other people and therefore also other journalists are. It is at times irritating and at times entertaining. All in all, good clean wholesome fun.

But what is this thing with putting down people who read other papers? Exhibit A: Spouting off enough cynical leftisms to give the average Daily Mail reader an aneurysm, writes Niall Doherty in The Fly, a free pop magazine. This sort of stereotyping is quite common. “People who read tabloids are scum” vs. “only upper-class gits bother with the broadsheets”. Somehow it still doesn’t feel very insulting, possibly because I’m prone to doing the same thing myself, especially with “women’s magazines”.

Exhibit B: I wonder how many Guardian readers are aware of where their icon stood on this matter, writes Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times. This commentary, in turn, left me baffled. If, as is often touted, UK is one of the few countries where there’s actual day-to-day competition between newspapers (see for example an article in the last issue of the Independent on Sunday), why does a writer go to such lengths to make sure no Guardian reader will want to switch papers? Why doesn’t he target the editors or the published, but the reader? Looks like bad thinking to me.

And why is it that that one sentence felt so insulting to me. Aha, says the clever reader, it is obviously because you think of yourself as a Guardian reader who idolizes Hillary Clinton! Well, might be. Another matter altogether is that Mr. Sullivan actually makes a classic mistake in his argument, the so-called “all animals are dogs” fallacy. People who read the Guardian very likely include some who do indeed idolize Ms. C. and did not know what she was up to. That doesn’t mean, however, that every reader thought the same.

Samankaltaisia merkintöjä

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