FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD for NOTHIN’ LEFT to LOSE

Over several months, most of the postings on this blog have also appeared on a website called London Progressive Journal. This is a non-profit site, freely accessible and free of advertising. It also necessarily pays nothing to its contributors. Writers and contributors generally appear on the site by invitation and either write new pieces for it (which I have done once or twice) or recycle material from other outlets (as I have generally done from this blog and as, for instance, George Monbiot does with his Guardian columns).

Recently, I have come into conflict with the duo who edit the site in their spare time. I thought the issues over which we disagreed were important, especially in a context that calls itself progressive, and so I wrote a piece that attempted to address those issues and submitted it on July 22nd. The editors have declined to engage with the matters I raised and have shown no inclination to publish the piece. So I present it below, on the assumption that it bears some interest beyond the narrow confines of LPJ. I have altered nothing from the original submission, save to add references in square brackets:

‘This is a piece about editorial policy on London Progressive Journal. That you are reading it may indicate that the editors have addressed or are willing to address the issues that I raise herein and the implications of those issues. Of course I cannot know in advance if they will have reproduced it exactly as I submitted it. That you, gentle reader, may know the answer to that question, I will post a comment on the matter once the piece is on-site.

How LPJ works is that postings are submitted, read by the editorial staff and transcribed to suit the technical requirements of the site. These requirements can be frustrating; for instance the site’s program cannot read my iMac’s italics and so I have had to devise a strategy for indicating where I mean words to be italicised that does not confuse the editors or cut across other print conventions. It also means that the text does not go blind onto the site. It is read and processed first and therefore there is scope for the introduction of unintended typos and other errors, for subbing and for other editorialising, even for mischief.

Readers without experience of journalism may not be familiar with the phenomenon of subbing. This is usually the work of an in-house assistant called a sub-editor but, in situations where staffing is tight, the task often falls to editors themselves. The sub-editor goes through the texts of articles, correcting unwonted errors by the writer: typos, spelling mistakes, factual inaccuracies, grammatical infelicities and other obvious blemishes. But the sub also has the power, often exercised, to change the text. This may be necessitated because of pressure on space (if, that is, you believe that the accommodation of surrounding advertisements and/or visual material related to the article’s subject matter is a necessity). It may also come about because the sub thinks he can improve the piece by cutting, by re-shaping, even by rewriting, perhaps because he doesn’t comprehend a particular point being made or thinks he can write better than the columnist or reporter. I have done masses of subbing myself but I never felt that it was any part of the job to alter what the writer wanted to say or how she wished to say it.

Intrusive subbing is one of the banes of the print journalist’s life. During my time as television previewer on The Independent some 25 years ago, I had occasion to make an appeal to the paper’s overall editor because the listings editor – a legendarily dreadful man called Elkan Allan (now deceased) – had broken this particular camel’s back by completely rewriting my preview of a documentary about the treatment of Aids. I had two advantages over Allan in the matter: I knew a lot about Aids and he knew nothing, and I had seen the programme and he had not. “To fit the headline” that he had chosen for the piece – a headline so banal and beside-the-point that I have not remembered it – he had changed everything that I had written, in the process ascribing to my by-line the assertion that Aids is a disease (it is a syndrome), that HIV is a virus (HI is a virus, the V stands for virus) and that Factor-8 is a drug (it is blood plasma). This nonsense made me look like an ignorant fool who had paid no attention to the film that I was previewing.

The editor of The Independent remained carefully noncommittal about what he clearly thought was a little local difficulty, but he also evidently discounted the outrageously untrue slurs that Elkan Allan levelled against me and my work in order to justify his egregious subbing. Nonetheless, Allan departed abruptly within the week and I was duly hailed by the other toilers in the listings section as a hero of the people.

But that’s all by the by. Star names in the press – I might suggest as examples John Pilger and George Monbiot – are not, I think, much troubled by subbing being applied to their much-desired work. It’s more obscure scribblers like me who have to fight for every word.

In the eight months or so that my stuff has been appearing on LPJ, I have had little cause to beef about subbing of the intrusive kind. But my two most recent submissions have raised some issues of editorial control that I think need to be addressed. This site is presented as an open forum and therefore it seems to me only proper to discuss these matters openly.

My most recent submission (last week) was entitled ‘A Word In Your Shell-Like’ [July 17th, below]. The version that was posted had three subbing errors that I quickly pointed out to the editors. But there was also something unprecedented added to the piece: a disclaimer at the bottom. It read: “The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the LPJ”.

I was completely bemused by this. What had occasioned it? Had I stepped over the line by demurring at Rory Bremner’s hoax? Was it an offence against progressive opinion to suggest that the Freedom of Information Act might make the practical business of government more tricky? Had I strained editorial patience by twitting Kelvin MacKenzie? How was I – or the reader – to tell?

To my email concerning subbing errors, I added this sentence: “As for the disclaimer at the bottom of the piece, I am absolutely hopping mad about it and, feeling as I do at present, am resolved that this will be my last piece for LPJ”.

One of the editors replied thus: “Thank you for your comments. We have made the requested amendments” (actually they have only made one of the three) “but I'm afraid that we won't be budging on the disclaimer below the article.

“We have great respect for your ideas and writing abilities and aim to ensure the LPJ expresses a broad range of opinions from its authors, including those that we, as editors, may personally not agree with.

“I'm afraid that neither of us feels that Assange or Manning is in the wrong and we didn't want to risk our readership feeling that we thought so.

“Hence, in the spirit of free speech - whilst sticking to our editorial policy and opinions - we felt the need to mention that the opinions in the article are the author’s and not necessarily ours. We have done this with articles from time to time, and even gained praise for doing so from authors who respected our decision to maintain our own views whilst allowing freedom of ideas.

“We hope you will reconsider your decision not to submit any further articles to the LPJ” (I have subbed quite a handful of typos and grammatical and other errors out of this email so that the editor may not be publicly embarrassed).

So that’s it. It’s what I wrote about WikiLeaks that has stuck in the editorial craw. You, gentle reader, will not have my piece to hand, so let me repeat the words with which I introduced the subject of WikiLeaks into the argument: “I may have missed something here but I have always struggled to understand the fine moral distinction between the publication of private conversations intercepted by hacking telephones and the publication of private conversations intercepted by a variety of other breaches of the law”.

I think that is a pretty explicit invitation to apologists for Assange and Manning to engage on the matter, to offer an argument that will enlighten me and soothe away my scepticism. To hand my piece to the readers at arm’s length, the other hand holding the editorial nose is, frankly, an insult both to me and to the reader.

It’s worth reacquainting ourselves with the site’s mission statement. LPJ, we are assured, represents “a non-sectarian left wing perspective” and “aims to provide an intelligent, critical and accessible discourse on the key issues”. It “is not affiliated with any political party or lobby group and therefore has no constraints over what it can publish. As such the range of opinion contained within the pages of the journal is relatively diverse”.

So we can be clear from this that the agenda of LPJ is not – or at any rate not necessarily – Marxist-Leninist, not Trotskyite, not Maoist, not anarcho-syndicalist, not libertarian Socialist, not situationist, not impossibilist, not old-Communist and indeed not (not necessarily) Assangist. Nevertheless, the editors do not “want to risk our readership feeling that (the editors think that) … Assange … is in the wrong”.

There is a rather large presumption here. It is presumed that the LPJ readership as a body subscribes to a consensus that the works of WikiLeaks are beyond question and that I alone am out of step with this happy union. Even were that true, by what editorial sleight of hand does my supposed maverick stance put me outside the tent pissing in rather than inside pissing out? Is there no longer any scope for discussion in self-proclaimed progressive circles? Is the sanctity of Julian Assange a fait accompli?

That the opinions expressed in LPJ do not, as a matter of course, chime consistently and unfailingly with those of the editors ought to go without saying. Progressive opinion, like Harold Wilson’s Labour Party, is “broad church”. There is not and cannot be, on a wide-ranging site like LPJ, an orthodoxy about every topic. Nor is progressive opinion a monolith that admits of no discussion or dissent. By all means let the site as a whole carry a disclaimer about all the material carried on it not necessarily reflecting the particular opinions of the editors. But to single out one posting and announce effectively that LPJ thinks it’s rubbish is not to be countenanced. Let one of the editors – or some other contributor, or Julian Assange himself (he is patently kicking his heels at present) – make the case for WikiLeaks in a complementary article. That is the mature and confident editorial response. To disassociate the site from one piece without any word of explanation is, at the very least, a discourtesy to everyone.

But this is the second successive posting of mine that has fallen foul of an editorial decision that greatly troubles me. The earlier piece was called ‘Bad Sight Of The Week’ [June 26th, below]. In it I deployed the word “cunt”. I did not do it gratuitously. I was quoting somebody else who used the word as a generic term for women. As it happens, perhaps as a semi-conscious test, I did use the emphatic “fucking” gratuitously in the piece and that was left alone.

The on-site version showed the quoted word as “c***”. I queried this. I was informed that one of the editors “hates the word”. I did not argue the toss further but it seemed to me to be no argument. There are plenty of words that I dislike for myriad reasons, but we are mature people, and language, in all its variety and multifariousness, is the tool that we use as writers and readers.

For an editor to blank a word because it is “hated” is a subjective and, I rather think, emotional use of editorial power. And – to give a dog a name – it is nothing short of censorship. I imagine that quite of lot of contributors to LPJ would not want to risk our readers feeling that we all thought censorship is acceptable.

These are fit matters for discussion, for god’s sake, not for indisputable editorial fiat. (By the by, I never capitalise the first letter of the term “god” because there is no god and so something that does not exist cannot possess a proper name. In LPJ, the “g” is routinely capitalised without discussion).

It is in the nature of the case that these words will be read by the editors before they are laid before the readers. So I say this to the editors – and I want the readers to know that it was said: do not refuse this contribution. There is no credible ground on which it may be refused. Let there be debate. Engage it yourselves but do it on the site, not out of the view of the readership. Remember that the piece that occasioned this debate was itself about freedom of the press. Do not fall into the trap of replicating the unyielding control over free expression in an open forum that has passed for editing in the capitalist press. It will be a struggle for you to reconcile a stance of intervening editorially in a free discussion with your fear that you may be thought opposed to Assange’s own purported quest to liberate information and open debate.

And I invite readers and other contributors to engage with these matters. Keeping channels open for uncensored debate is the most important function that LPJ can perform’.

P.S.: I no longer submit pieces to London Progressive Journal.