Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Liddleballs

So, apparently Rod "goat curry" Liddle is not going to be the editor of the Independent.

And already people are queueing up to point fingers at the evil liberals whose screeching campaign against the world's most hilarious journalist stopped someone so brilliant from single-handedly rescuing the ailing Indy. One such person is Tim Luckhurst in today's Guardian.

Are we really supposed to believe that, despite the Jimmy Savile-a-like's apparent superior skills and the alleged fact he was the best man for the job, that everyone was just scared off from making the right decision by a bunch of shouty liberals? Come off it. No-one's ever been scared off by a bunch of shouty liberals, except other shouty liberals. Sunny claims victory over at Liberal Conspiracy, and it's certainly a decision to be pleased about in the context of there not being a total reactionary arse editing one of the two remaining supposedly liberal-left national newspapers. But I am not entirely sure that the campaign was the only thing that won the day.

More likely, I think, is another possibility: that the revelations about Liddle's fondness for posting stuff that was rather unpleasant on football message boards marked him out to be a bit of a loose cannon. Let's assume he didn't write any of the contentious posts, and his defence about having his computer hacked into by someone else is entirely true: even then, he still comes across as a bit of a loose cannon, and someone who, as Sarah Ditum pointed out, doesn't really understand technology tremendously well. Is that really the person you want running a national newspaper in the digital age, overseeing its web operations?

Secondly, I think it is worth considering the idea that the campaign didn't pluck Liddle's unpopularity among Indy readers out of the air - it actually existed, and exists. As a self-confessed bleeding heart, though a non-sandal-wearing non-yoghurt-weaving non-Islingtonite type of bleeding heart, I'm the kind of person who might buy the Independent - and indeed I have done many hundreds of times, largely for the news, world news and sport, as well as the Howard Jacobson column on a Saturday (I know, I know, you needn't point it out to me) or Robert Fisk, but I assume some of it's been down to the fact that I find it one of the least offensive options on the news-stand, and sometimes the thing that offends you the least is what you go with. (For example, the Guardian's politics might not offend me, but all that endless wall of sewage about buying really expensive stuff, the lifestyle flannel, makes me lose the will to live.)

Now, as a potential Independent reader, my emotional reaction to his possible editorship is that I don't really like it. I think he's a bit of a berk. Reading him tiptoeing over the racism tightrope in his Spectator articles is a thoroughly grim thing for me and I can only imagine a newspaper edited by him to make the same kind of inept judgements over stories as he does over his choice of words - possibly even being as unpleasantly provocative, as well. In which case, I don't really think I want to buy the thing any more. It's gone from being least offensive to possibly most offensive. Do I really want to waste my time with that?

Perhaps the reaction to Liddle's possible appointment, the Facebook group, and all of that stuff, wasn't a bunch of nasty liberal bastards bullying the Indy bigwigs into rejecting the stellar candidate. Maybe it really was the case that Liddle would have been a liability, and a business decision was taken, rather than a hysterical "hiding behind the settee because of those ghastly lefties and their supreme power" decision that we're supposed to imagine has taken place, if you believe what some are saying.

It's important to bear this in mind because there's a danger in all this that liberals inevitably end up getting painted as fascists by the kind of people who view them with nothing but contempt. Look at the censorship-happy liberals, they will say. First they tried to ban Jan Moir because she just spoke her mind - we didn't, but thanks anyway - and now they've banned a brilliant genius from being the best Indy editor ever - we didn't, but thanks anyway. The left only gets made to look powerful when it's being wrongly blamed for clamping down on freedom. The narrative is a familiar one, though, one in which the hypocritical liberal-left fascist scum are the real anti-freedom people out there, and it's only brave souls like Liddle who are battling for freedom and truth, and de dah de dah de dah, you get the general idea. We encounter it so often it's wearying.

Maybe it wasn't us. Maybe it was just business, and a realisation that this person wasn't the right one for the job. Who knows - maybe there is another human being in Britain more capable of editing a national newspaper than Liddle? Can't we even entertain that possibility? No, blame the liberals; blame the mob. So much easier.

Related posts:

1. The Indy’s in a Liddle bit of trouble
2. The Liddle Defence
3. A Liddle bit of racism
4. PCC discovers ominous milk tooth
5. If you don’t think torture’s a good idea, you might as well be in the bloody Taliban