Why not put some of Liddle’s own quotes on the mock paper – some people parody themselves better than anyone else could

The problem is that a threatened boycott by existing readers is of limited worth when there are not enough existing readers to make publishing viable. I suspect a market reorientation such as putting Mr Liddle as editor (note, not as anything else so I suspect that you’d get pretty much the same reporters and columnists) would be aimed at finding new readers (perhaps poached from the Times and Telegraph) rather than maintaining present ones.

I’d like to see Liddle become the editor of the Independent.
Only because it would make things interesting for a while.
It’s a bit sad when you admit to yourself that you seem to find greater interest in news stories and the media than your own (one’s) sad little life.

And I’d be interested to see how it would change. He’d hardly sack all the more liberal columnists and bring in right wingers.

“The time for talking is over. Now call it extreme if you like, but I propose we hit it hard and we hit it fast, with a major, and I mean major, leaflet campaign.”

You could call yourselves the The World Against Terrible Liddle’s Independent Paper Strategies, but I’m open to improvements on that.

The Facebook group against Liddle is now nearing 4,000.

Couple of hundred more and that will be the entire readership.

4,000 Facebook members. That’ll be about the remaining readership of the Indy then. The trouble you will face is that your brand of right-on left-wing agitprop is just not very popular among, you know, the lumpen proletariat. Just ask The Guardian. It can only print its left-wing bias because it is funded by magazines about gas-guzzling, global warming causing cars. The Indy doesn’t have such a crutch.

Am I missing something (like a joke perhaps)? I thought Suzanne Moore had admitted she’d been offered the job?

Would prefer Liddle to be honest, at least he’s readable but there we go….

Aren’t there are just a couple more important things going on at the moment than the editorship of a very minor newspaper?

Sunny,

Is this the journalistic equivalent of the battle of Thermopylae?
You are so heroic, but don’t forget Leonidas I didn’t manage to survive.

“The trouble you will face is that your brand of right-on left-wing agitprop is just not very popular among, you know, the lumpen proletariat.”

Your ignorance is showing AGAIN, Dunderhead. The “lumpen proletariat” are never going to be stirred by “left-wing agitprop” because, as Marx pointed out when he coined the term, the “lumpen proletariat” are the ragged (lumpen) underclass who are easy prey for criminality or ultra-reactionary politics (the BNP, anyone?).

You meant “the proletariat.” Oh – and you were talking shite as well. But what’s new?

There are many good candidates who reflect our tolerant, liberal values.

The only thing we won’t tolerate, is intolerance!

Just to play devil’s advocate: maybe it’s preferable for readers to know where the Indy is coming from, rather than persist with the present situation, where a right-wing economic agenda is masked by ‘leftist’ hand-wringing on social and ecological issues. At present, for instance, we have a lot of headlines warning of the consequences of climate change, but no recognition of the free market’s role in exacerbating it. Instead, ‘the market’ is promoted as the solution rather than the problem; we have a lot of cant about equality of opportunity alongside pressure to create a market in higher education; we have concern about access to healthcare and inequalities in outcome with a call for more involvement of American private health insurance corporations (despite the stark example of US healthcare); we have headlines about the parlous state of social care, with editorials advocating the disingenuous view that the burden should fall more on the individual than the taxpayer; we have calls for a rolling back of state provision in pensions alongside headlines about fuel poverty. As it has moved further right on economic issues, its Janus-faced approach has become more pronounced. A paper which accommodates Johann Hari, Dominic Lawson and Bruce Anderson could be seen as ‘independent’, or just schizophrenic. The haemorrhaging of readership suggests the latter.

But, let’s be honest, what is the likelihood of any newspaper owned by a billionnaire offering a genuinely centre-left perspective? In that sense, a Liddle editorship would simply be more transparent.

I’m not a fan of the Indy, Liddle and dodgy Russian Oligarchs, but why should the potential new owner of one paper (Indy) care what the readers of another paper (Guardian) think?

The Independent is swimming in the same pool as the Guardian, but doesn’t have the web of cross-subsidies and tax arrangements that keeps the Guardian afloat. That rumours have Liddle and Moore being in the frame suggests the potential new owners are aware of this problem.

“Your ignorance is showing AGAIN, Dunderhead. The “lumpen proletariat” are never going to be stirred by “left-wing agitprop” because, as Marx pointed out when he coined the term, the “lumpen proletariat” are the ragged (lumpen) underclass who are easy prey for criminality or ultra-reactionary politics (the BNP, anyone?).

You meant “the proletariat.” Oh – and you were talking shite as well. But what’s new?”

Ha ha. I’ll bow to your greater knowledge of Marxist theory! You must find it very useful.

I notice you completely ignore the central point which is that not enough people want to read news with a left-wing bias to cover the cost of providing it to them. Trying to keep the Independent left-wing will only lead to fewer readers, especially as they can get news with a left-wing bias free from the BBC, whether they want to or not.

Not surprisingly, as a left-winger you are not burdened with any sense of economic reality.

Maybe you could follow the Guardian’s model and buy a nice capitalist business, preferably doing things that left-wingers would normally demonise, and use the profits (shock horror!) to subsidise your new Pravda (channeled, natch, via the tax-efficient Cayman Islands – like the Guardian). Wouldn’t get you any more readers though.

For a bunch of trolls who claim you don’t care for the Indy (or me) some of you spend an awful lot of time on this site telling everyone how much you don’t care.

Charles wheeler – not sure I buy that point… first there is an issue of one of two remaining liberal-left papers being run by a reactionary racist / sexist troll. Secondly – Rod Liddle is a piece of scum and te thought of him running a national paper is a scary thought. He would be a mini-Dacre without any of the professionalism.

If people do t like the campaign – no skin off my back!

I wish this article could have been published magically one yr ago.

http://ithp.org/articles/obamatruecolors.html

It’s not a dreadfully substantial comment, I know, but could I just say “Rimmer quotes ftw”?

Hi Sunny,

If the articles in the dummy copy of the Independent need copy editing/spg checking, please let me know.