Maxed out

I've just about got over crying with laughter at the Guardian's appallingly bad decision to get the 19-year-old son of a travel writer to witter on about his gap year jaunt on its travel blog - and the commissioning editor's genuine surprise that so many of its readers were outraged. The unwitting lad concerned, Max Gogarty, found himself hung, drawn and quartered all over the internet. Of course, nepotism is all over the media, but it looks like the paper's been left genuinely startled by the abuse it's received.

But will it listen? Probably not. Not even to brilliant commentary such as this:

What's simultaneously so marvellous and so awful about this story is what a paradigm it is for so much. For how the interweb can explode a little story so quickly. For how much hatred there towards a perceived middle class London coterie who run the media. For how un-selfaware that coterie is about their own status. For how much funnier cruel stuff is than all that serious nonsense. For how easy it is to be vitriolic when blogging. And so on and so on.

I don't think it honestly occurs to you - and when I say 'you', I mean London based journos on the nationals - just how often, how incessantly and how forcefully we are fed the stories of the lives of a small subsection of London society, how we can't open a paper or magazine without hearing their bleating, self-important voices complaining about their nannies, discussing whether it's OK to wear a mini skirt round the Portobello Road if you're over 40, and yes, just what their kids did on their gap years. It's so dispiriting and depressing to find that there is LESS of a cross section of a society represented in the acres of newsprint that there were 30 years ago. Like university education, the clock is turning back from the brave years of working class kids taking a step up. Unis are more middle class than ever and so are newspapers.

By god, Guardian, didn't any of you recognise this as an article that was going to get SLAUGHTERED by us mere provincial mortals? No, you didn't, because you too, stuffed to the gills with your Marinas and Cartner-Morleys, you just took it as read that he'd be accepted as the voice of youth. That's how out of touch you are.

Yes, this whole thing has gone OTT, but don't blame your readership for biting back for being so consistently and systematically excluded from your version of who the world consists of - and giving an article like that space instead. You got found out. Good.

Comments

[Max]

From Ed Reardon's Week, the episode "The Old Boys Network":

"...there is a theory that listening to morning news programs keeps one in touch. Nothing of the sort. It merely introduces one to a freemasonry of narcissistic windbags, who were at university with each other, pontificating about what they consider to be important, or reading out what their fellow Oxbridge alumnae have written in the newspaper that morning, all of it larded with threat that more of the same asinine dribble is to follow in the next hour. It is at this moment that the wise man turns to Radio 3, whose contributors have lived a bit and created something that will last, unlike the mutually back-scratching banter as perpetrated by Mr Humphreys and Naughtie."

[ourman]

That was the comment I picked up on to. Exactly my thoughts and about time someone said it to the Guardian.

Funny, the morning before Max’s piece went live I was writing about the Guardian and complaining of its awful way of looking at everything from a North London point of view. Everything they write, regarding outside of this area is sneering and patronising.

Max got abuse but not nearly as much as the travel editor. It’s a reflection of how stale and small minded the Guardian has become that it thought the whole debacle was a good idea.

Time for a shake up there - less yoof orientated crap (no skins, no big brother), time for them to discover life outside of North London and time for them to ditch the New Labour smugness.

[Middle Class Revolt]

Oh, it gets better:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/17/internet?gusrc=rss&feed=technology

I wonder how many man hours and unit costs have been devoted to this spirited defence of a tiny milieu and its privileged position for having been exposed to the concepts of scrutiny and accountability? Young Max will surely have the admiration of Farringdon NUJ chapel for his monumental sacrifice as the lightning rod in this episode. There'll be no interning for him when he finishes uni, just a cushy desk and expenses tab.

There, there, mummy make it better and the nasty men will go away (well, that's clearly what they want to hear).

I think this has to rank up there with Madeleine Bunting quitting the Guardian for the directorship of a wacky think tank, deciding it wasn't for her and then being offered her old job back no questions asked. How's that for job security?

[Inspector Sands]

Oh dear. The Observer doesn't get it, does it?

[diamond geezer]

See, you start moaning about gap years, and look what happens...

(damn)

[Huw]

I think a lot of the initial comments were class related rather than being about nepotism though. It often seems that there is an element on CiF who are ready to pounce on anything deemed too white, too middle class. And yet I'm sure a lot of it is authored by people whose only major difference to Max is they can no longer fit into skinny jeans themselves.

[Paul Moloney]

"deciding it wasn't for her"

I think you mispelled "being hastily dispatched when the Demos staff went mental".

P.