The New Independent Editor
Wow. According to MediaLens, the upcoming editor of the Independent is Roger Alton. He was editor of the Observor in 2002, and here’s how he works:
all was not well in the Observer newsroom in the autumn of 2002. The newspaper’s correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, had been talking with Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst. Despite leaving the agency, Goodman retained his high security clearance and remained in communication with senior former colleagues. Goodman told Vulliamy that, in contradiction to everything the British and American governments were claiming, the CIA were reporting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Goodman was willing to go on the record as a named source. It was an incredibly important scoop but the Observer refused to publish it.
Over the next four months, Vulliamy submitted seven versions of the story for publication - his editors rejected every one of them. (pp.329-331) In January 2003, the Observer’s then editor, Roger Alton, told his staff: “We’ve got to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.†(p.350)
In support of this stance, the Observer’s David Rose echoed government propaganda on Iraq’s alleged connections with al-Qaeda - a performance that ended with a humbling apology from Rose in 2004. He described how his trust in official sources had been “misplaced and naïve… I look back with shame and disbeliefâ€. (p.334)
Other people paid the price. Eleven days after Vulliamy’s story was rejected for the seventh time in March 2003, the first bombs fell on Baghdad.
The rest of that particular report is excellent; 80% of UK mainstream news is not researched by journalists but comes straight off newswires and from PR companies.
The The New Independent Editor by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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