Ashberto - back to our conversation last week, do you really think now is the time for the

media to drop its emphasis on personality politics?

Even in the newspaper world’s heyday, editors would agonise over their lead stories. Get it wrong, and their readership could fall by hundreds of thousands. Get it wrong several times and your advertisers start to get jumpy.

And yet you are proposing that right now, at a time when papers are desperately trying to work out how to survive in a digital age, they should change their approach with absolutely no guarantee it will work and a huge weight of evidence that it won’t (papers spend huge amounts on researching what their audience wants) because Jeremy Corbyn says they should?

Surely Corbyn has, if anything, much more of a personality than a great deal of your airfix model oxford ppe/spad/safe-seat production line politicians. And also a far more compelling story of long and distinguished service.

I mean, he's a million miles ahead of literally every other labour leadership candidate for starters.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/apr/11/pressandpublish ing.mirror

This is what happened when The Mirror tried to become a serious paper in the early noughties

strange of them to blame the "controversial anti-war stance" though. Most right-thinking people were against the Iraq war, or at least viewed it pretty cynically at the time.

Mind you, people do seem to have actually accepted it was a bloody stupid idea which has achieved nothing but the rise of ISIS and a stronger Iran.

I mean, I'm no expert but they were pretty much the exact opposite of what they wanted.

a not wholly interesting man doing a very nice job of selling something nobody wants.

I think there's real hunge for someone offering an alternatibve to the third way/middle of the road thing tbh, at least there certainly is among people I know.

The only left(ish) people I know who are broadly against the whole business are children of the whole nulabor orthadoxy who generally tend to marry blair's morals with brown's stubborness anyway.

One of the Sundays about 12+ months ago.

:hehe:

f**k him.

and lets not going down the whole people who go on marches route. The majority of whom are wastrels, students and eco-mentalists (or all 3)

for obvious reasons but now I do remember the popular music star coming out with that as well :hehe:

The missus knows him very well (not like that)

But... a genuine polymath and worth listening to, in spite of the enormous ego and vested interests.

You don’t actually think this can end well, do you?

And who had been our pal not fifteen years earlier, to the point we sold him the chemical weapons which we later castigated him for using when we were building a fabricated case that he was building dubyaemdees.

I'm pretty sure even the biggest fool realises they were played on that whole business now.

And yes, the ISIS thing was a touch unfortunate but if they'd listened to the thousands of analysts they employed rather than going on a zealot's crusade they would have seen it coming.

So, yeah, ultimately it's the people who go on marches that are the idiots.

And with it any aspiration to represent the people they were founded to.

just because Mr Corbyn is in favour of it. I'm saying so because I think it would be a good thing for the health of political discourse in general. Why is it so shocking to suggest that the ball is played rather than the man?

Why do any of the newspapers ever deal with serious issues at all, if the people who you describe as 'cancer-deserving scum' only want scandal?

That's the thing with vested interests, people do everything they can to protect them.

You, not the marchers.

Not sure that did much for the credibility of his paper.

so could in no way effect that circulation drop. Morgan was widely praised for his stance at the time - certainly within the industry

when their readership falls, their advertising revenues quickly follows, and they have to lay off more staff and edge closer to the cliff.

Unless you are arguing against the huge weight of evidence that shows this is what happens when papers get serious?

This is not to say there is no place for serious journalism. But it is the personality stuff that makes papers viable businesses.

Millions of people who knew that a war was being fought on false pretences, and/or correctly predicted that it would end badly, marched in protest. But despite being correct in their analysis, they are sneered at such terms as 'wastrels and eco-mentalists'. They certainly worked harder to develop an understanding of the conflict than the jingoists who backed it. And they certainly didn't march for 'eco-mentalism'.

The destruction of the Iraqi state and the subsequent vacuum into which extremists poured was predictable, hence the rise of ISIS was a consequence of the war.

Pretending to give a damn about Saddam is nonsense too. Such 'strongmen', are no problem when they are strategic allies, so crocodile tears about the nature of the regime are entirely fake.

because of the entrenched, class- and ideology-based nature of the two main parties, which polarises debate to such an extent that it becomes more like a discussion between rival football supporters than a political conversation. The fact that there are so many people (and I include myself in this) who would never vote for one or other party regardless of their policies is the real problem, since it makes everything into a shouting match. And, in a shouting match, personal insults are always going to be a currency.

The nature and editorial direction of the press and media merely reflects that situation. It doesn't create it.

because of your mum, do you mean?

Thw World needs a good war or 2 every now and then

if you want something said, you ask Britain.

We are an island. A small, fairly insignificant one at that. It doesn't really matter what we do (or even that we do anything at all), so instead we just talk, in the bland, light-hearted, flippant way you *can* talk if nobody is waiting for you to actually solve anything.

means is 'people who agree with me'.

prosecution, though. The disbanding of the Iraqi military and exclusion of all Ba'ath party members from power - along with the favouring of the Shi'ites over the Sunnis - were strategic errors in the post-war administartion that led to the current situation. They could and should have been avoided, but they were nothing to do with the aims and objectives of the war itself.

Thus, the fact that the way in which the war was prosecuted has had negative consequences does not ipso facto make those who marched against the war correct, I'm afraid, since they were simply marching against the fact of its prosecution and could have had no idea what the outcomes were likely to be.

So fond are you and Sir C of it I had hope it might be picked up on.

merely that it did the exact opposite of what they wanted to do

All that marching and shouting turned out to be little more than banter.