All too revealing of how the system works ... how the talented former chief of the FT, capitalism’s house journal, was in thrall to ‘movers and shakers’
Even a brilliant newspaper editor can undersell a good story on the front page. At the start of Lionel Barber’s account of the world from his perspective as editor of the Financial Times between 2005 and 2020, there is an extensive list of dramatis personae, almost all of them male. (“One day,” he writes later, “I will deal with the alpha male problem, but not today.”) The players are broken down into their categories: politics, business and finance, royalty, journalism and diplomacy. The heart sinks – if journalism sits so easily in such a cast list, how can it do its job of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?
When, in the preface, Barber writes of being “granted audiences with royalty such as Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Mohammed bin Salman”, the sinking heart becomes the creeping flesh. The idea of an editor being “granted an audience” is bad enough. When one of those gracious enough to allow him into his presence is an alleged killer and another pals around with a convicted sex offender, it threatens to put the sick into sycophancy.
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