Ed Moloney’s “delicious” Stephen Glover is sacked over putrid article
Stephen Glover - co-founder of the Independent
but forgot the paper's truly liberal ethos
In any country, the sacking of a media commentator in a national newspaper usually provokes a rash of comment in a gossip driven market. However, the fact that the English Independent's media editor Stephen Glover was sacked last week by the paper’s editor, Chris Blackhurst, has barely registered on the Richter scale of media comment. How strange.
Only the Guardian’s Media Monkey noted Glover’s demise with a brief note that can be read here –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2012/apr/02/stephen-glover-gone-independent-media-monkey
Cic Saor Cognoscenti will recall that Glover was the subject of a recent blog in which I questioned a venomous and highly personalised attack by Glover on Guardian media columnist Roy Greenslade and, lo and behold, it is this very article that was the final straw for Chris Blackhurst.
My original Cic Saor blog about Glover’s article can be read here -
http://www.fadooda.com/index.php?itemid=403
It is perhaps even more surprising that no Irish media outlet has picked up on the story, because the article by Glover, which precipitated the termination of his contract at the Independent, was regurgitated not once but twice over here in Ireland. Irish journalist Ed Moloney also picked up on Glover’s article on his “brokenelbow” blog site, describing it as “delicious”.
Now we just have silence over this sordid little affair and it falls to Cic Saor to remind people why Stephen Glover’s sacking is important in the Irish narrative.
The initial reason that Glover attacked Roy Greenslade was because Greenslade wrote an article in his Guardian media column lambasting Henry McDonald’s journalism, when McDonald wrongly attributed a murder in Belfast to dissident "assassins". But, scion of the English establishment that he is, Glover went way beyond merely defending McDonald and launched a highly personalised assault on Greenslade.
And what was Roy Greenslade’s crime according to Glover? What was it that led Stephen Glover to react the way he did, and for both Ed Moloney and then Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Irish Independent to join in the attack?
Well, quite apart from defending Henry McDonald, they donned their journalistic black caps because not only does Greenslade have the temerity to be on friendly terms with certain Sinn Féiners, he also has a house in Donegal, is married to an Irish woman and once secretly wrote for An Phoblacht at a time when publicly doing so was an effectively an invitation for the security forces to pass your personal details to their favourite loyalist death squad. Quite clearly beyond the pale of decency then.
The English Independent - striking a blow for decency and journalistic standards
But now some sense of honour has been restored by Chris Blackhurst telling Stephen Glover that his anti Greenslade diatribe was overly personal and not something that would interest Independent readers. In other words, in the opinion of the newspaper's editor, it was not worthy of the standard expected of the Independent newspaper.
But where does this leave Ed Moloney and Ruth Dudley Edwards? For the fact is that they backed an article that is now deemed unworthy of serious journalism. The Dublin Evening Herald also regurgitated Glover’s bile on the 14th of March.
How ironic that it took an English journalist, Chris Blackhurst, to reassert the principles of high journalistic values and basic decency in our use of language and to signal very clearly that Glover's article was simply not acceptable.
I will leave readers with one more picture - again linked to the Independent newspaper - a picture of a journalist who worked in the North for years but never became cynical or bitter; a journalist who simply carried on shining the light into the dark corners of state power - the primary role of any journalist worthy of the name.
Robert Fisk - Oide, Taoiseach agus Fear Uasal - A Teacher, Leader and Noble Man
@ Paul Larkin
Carraic, Gaoth Dobhair
Mí Aibreáin, 2012