Why is the left press so crashingly dull?
Posted on Monday 19 January, 2009
Filed Under The left
I HAVE in the past worked for Tribune and Red Pepper, and written for New Statesman and the Morning Star. For the sake of sentiment alone, I naturally wish all of these fine publications well.
But in truth, these days not even nostalgia combined with a vague sense of duty can motivate me to read any of them regularly. And if such titles cannot get people like me to fork out for a subscription, it is little wonder that they are – without exception – struggling to survive.
Unfortunately there is no nice way of putting this to the many friends of mine, including an ex-wife, who do their valiant best to keep the left press from complete collapse. But the basic problem here is that almost all the content of the above is tailor-made to fit the description ‘worthy but dull’. Sorry, but there you have it.
The irony is that, in a climate where capitalism is increasingly under question, and even New Labour is being forced involuntarily to discuss issues such as nationalisation and class, there should be an obvious market for punchy and well-written leftwing writing.
There is a clear need for something more than what is on offer from the national press and broadcast media, which restrict themselves – to paraphrase Dorothy Parker – to the whole gamut of political opinion from A to B, and even the biggest leftie blogs are not yet capable of plugging the gap.
Yet look at what is happening out there. Red Pepper could not sustain monthly publication, and has been forced to half its frequency. Trib came close to closure last year, and only managed to avoid going under after an unnamed Labour Party figure promised to put up £40,000 a year and the unions agreed to write off existing debts.
The word is that the new boss – anybody know who he or she is, by the way? – is keen on extended coverage of EU affairs, which is unlikely to make for the kind of riveting journalism that will bring back the paying punters.
Things do seem to be looking up for the Morning Star, which has recently relaunched with higher pagination, and finally made its website free. Yet this has only been achieved thanks to financial support from Anita Halpin, a veteran communist who became an overnight multimillionaire in 2006, after selling an inherited painting.
The newspaper shows no sign of being able to pay its way, and Ms Halpin is said to want to be a hands-on proprietor, enforcing a pro-Labour editorial line that will put paid to earlier flirtation with the idea of some kind of new left party.
Meanwhile, the Guardian media supplement this morning carries an extensive feature on the travails of the Staggers, now owned by a squabbling diumvirate of Geoffrey Robinson and millionaire businessman Mike Danson.
All the signs are looking bad. The magazine is refusing to recognise the National Union of Journalists, has made a number of long-time staffers redundant, and has apparently ditched star columnist John Pilger, still one of my journalistic heroes.
Circulation is falling fast. Recently-appointed editor Jason Cowley is said to want to ‘remake the title as a mainstream magazine with broad appeal … running more big reads on subjects ranging from food to sport’.
Well, he’s in the editor’s chair and it’s his call, but I cannot see how the strategy can possibly work. The field is already crowded. Who is going to pay a hefty cover charge for the kind of material that comes free in endless national newspaper supplements every weekend?
Such an editorial direction is far cry from what the New Statesman represented in the 1980s, when it regularly broke investigative journalism scoops and carried some coruscating critiques of Thatcherism.
The reality is the leftwing public deserves a better media diet than an endless succession of badly-ghosted opinion pieces published under the by-line of a trade union general secretary. Interspersed with first-person accounts of time spent on work brigades in Cuba. Either the left press starts to provide it, or it is not much longer for this world.
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Comments
60 Responses to “Why is the left press so crashingly dull?”
The latest report on the national media has recommended that ITV move out of local news production. I think that this would be a big mistake, partly because of the loss of jobs but also, for democracy to function, people need information. With no local press, we wouldn’t know about hospital closures or school amalgamations before they happened. The local left press of the 70s was a vibrant thing, and it is sorely missed. Of-course, it isn’t just the local newsheets that have gone, it’s the lefty, independent bookshops, the two were interdependent. I can appreciate why there is the siren call of the internet, but what worries me is that only committed people will log on to the site. Would it not be a good idea to produce a print version simultaneously to reach ‘casual’ readers? As Joe Hill said, ‘Don’t Mourn, Organise.’.
Sue
Agreed, once you’ve got it in electronic format, as web pages, it is easy enough to do, just a simple cut’n'paste job to produce a local edition.
PS: Alice, you’re right too many blokes on the Left get into “pissing contests”, bad habit, I apologise.
@Fiona
I have been a supporter of Red Pepper for many years, even selling it at events and basically being an evangelist for it in the past, etc, It can be extremely interesting and incisive at times. I also like its eclecticness(sic),and the way it gives young writers a voice
My beef ,an i stand by it, is that while you have covered housing, the NHS etc in depth you have most certainly not covered the Gov’t ‘welfare reforms’, the biggest in 60 years, which see millions lose money, forced into cheap labour and in some cases medical treatment.Indeed, I’m not sure if you have covered poverty in the Uk in any depth, i have the mags and I will defo look, though I am quite sure about this omission.
I have contacted Hilary or the former editors by phone, email, press release to suggest this coverage over the years, which sadly now i am no postion to help with..
HTUT
@Andrew,
can’t find your bit on WReform and H/Wainwright, etc
The things that would make such a pdf work would be content.
I’ve never seen anything said by any of those who write the most popular Left blogs (including this one, Lenin’s Tomb, Socialist Unity and more) that indicates any interest in co-operating wider and trying to get their, and similar views, to the next level – where they are not just reliant on people visiting their blogs but could possibly have many more receiving their content and also possibly help a general revival of Left views (many newspaper columinists predict we may be in a boom period with capitalism crumbling – but what do they know) by building an authoratative and credible Left media outlet in the way the NS never was, Tribune never could be, Red Pepper may have been but failed but the Morning Star possibly could become (although that would be the right of the far-ish Left e.g. supporting Simpson rather than Hicks in the Union election).
The two different routes as outlined by Modernity and Chris Williams are both very useful tutorials.
I will file them away as guides but fear that the welcome offers of commitment by people like E10, me and Chris won’t get us very far at the moment.
There remains a crying need a Left (electronic) Spectator and also a Left portal (the place where you go to meet other TU militants in your town, school students ask basic questions about socialism etc) but it will take either a lot more enthusiasm by a wider range of people, or maybe more likely, a coming upsurge that will wipe into insignificance all these proprietorial blogs to be replaced with outlets that represent living tendencies and movements – hopefully joined together – rather than the politics of a single individual.
I look forward to them being built. As Modernity correctly points out the old excuse of ‘We haven’t got the money’ no longer applies.
SPP,
in the nicest possible way, PDFs are a pain.
a lot of sites (notably some TU ones or designed by those companies) only provide some coverage in PDFs, which necessitate having a PDF reader installed
rather sites should aim to have both HTML and PDF documents, it means that people with slow PCs, with accessibility issues, without a reader or those that don’t like PDFs (Adobe reader is terribly bloated), etc couldn’t then access the content
the objective should be to make ALL content as accessible as possible, just from a browser (even old ones or text based), reach as many people as possible
I think this Portal is an excellent idea, but as you say needs co-operation from people to work.
the left publications are boring because the left as a unified formation is dead – so theres no sense that the coverage is contributing to a march forward, a strategy. the interesting places are those where theres been a radical re-evaluation such as ’spiked’
Let’s face it, guys, if you could conceive of a smart idea, organize a team of workers, put it into action, innovate, and follow through perfecting your execution – you’d be entrepreneurs, not lefties.
HTUT, the link is given above. And here
http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/hilary-wainwright-goes-localist-why-the-left-is-barely-fighting-workfare/
I read Red Pepper, since Ipswich Central Library gets it (It has a bettr selection of publications than any Library in London that I know of).
Since I have blogged on this and written for Chartist on it, not to mention drafted last year’s Trades Councils’ motion opposing Welfare Reform (for the unemployed etc) I noticed quite clearly that Red Pepper was not covering the issue.
There is a good article about Welfare Reform by Louise in the latest Briefing.
Spart! Put an RSS feed on your blog, please!
Strange that nobody has mentioned the real reason why the right wing rags you describe as dull, actually they are simply shite, are so boring.
The fact is that they are dominated by people who are committed to politics that are based on;
(1) a denatured watered down statism, as with the semi-senile Stalinoids of the Bore;
(2)are committed to that form of liberalism that once made up the ideological substitute for a backbone that functioned as such in Tribune;
(3) or are committed to a more ‘modern’ Third Worldist liberalism, as with Red (sic) Pepper, thats never views working people in this country as the starting point for anything but pity.
Let them all die.