Secrets and Bollocks

He's back, he's back, oh joy! Apparently Decent Dave is working two jobs these days; during the week, he toils in the mines of Murdoch, but at weekends, he is still writing for the increasingly unbearable Observer. I certainly hope that someone at the Scott Trust (motto: "What on earth were we thinking of when we took on this money-losing piece of crap of a Sunday?") will before long remind him of the old Irish proverb about the difficulty of riding two horses while only possessing one arse. I presume that he's saving the best bits for midweek, because Sunday's col was a stinker. Not evil or anything, just horribly aimless and wittering. Whoever subbed it also presumably fell asleep at the wheel, given the misleading and/or meaningless hed.

The Islington Sparrow is medibating (a cross between meditating and masturbating, a neologism coined to describe Aaro columns) on the Watergate revelations. He's against them, I think, not in themselves, but because they set a dangerous precedent which led to the leaking of the Attorney General's advice on Iraq. Yup, it's the Munchausen-by-proxy version of Carly Simon Disease; Dave's so vain, he thinks that everything is about him and That Bloody War.

It's rather sweet really; he tries to write about something else, but it all comes back to Iraq in the end. The interesting thing is that Dave reproves other journalists for relying on unnamed sources, and claims that it erodes public trust in the media. But he doesn't actually name any instances in which newspapers have done this. And the big unmentioned elephant here, of course, is that of all the British publishing organisations which have embarrassed themselves by relying on anonymous single sources in the last couple of years, the most prominent is Her Majesty's Stationery Office who, poor buggers, don't have the luxury of demanding that their authors check their facts. Which is presumably what this column is all about; Decent Dave is still chewed up by That Bloody Prediction and is projecting like hell onto the rest of the media and the rest of us.

The interesting thing about the col. is that it never appears to cross the Aaro-mind that the truth of leaks and Deep Throats might be a criterion against which they be judged; he regards them as all basically entertainment like the Archers. What matters is the motivation of the person behind them. We the newspaper reading public have got it all wrong when we fork over our Sunday quid hoping to find something out about the world, or about the way we're being governed. The correct purpose of a newspaper is to help the reader establish the correct line to take on the issues that the people writing it deem important. I'm hardly the first person to say this about Aaro, but that doesn't make it less true; you can take the hack out of the Communist Party but you can't take the Communist Party out of the hack.