On running a satire desk, reading across the network, and the discipline of the open mind
On running a satire desk, reading across the network, and the discipline of the open mind
The editor’s chair is, I have come to believe, the best seat in the house from which to watch a country argue with itself, and I spend a great deal of my week in it, reading Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, where my editorials appear, alongside the rest of the network. A diary from this chair is necessarily half about the strange business of editing and half about the stranger business of politics, which is, after all, the same business conducted with worse jokes.
The personal bit: the editor’s quiet hours
My days are mostly silence and reading, which suits me. I rise early, make coffee that is too strong on purpose, and read for two hours before I let myself write a word, because an editor who writes before he reads is just a man with opinions and a keyboard, which is most of the internet already. I sift the submissions, I argue with writers who are usually right, and I spend an unreasonable amount of time on the placement of a single comma, on the theory that the comma is where the thinking shows.
People assume that running a satire desk is a riot of laughter, and it is the most serious work I have ever done. Comedy is a precision instrument; a joke that lands a millimetre off is just an insult, and an insult, unlike a joke, teaches no one anything. So we labour over the absurd with the gravity of watchmakers, and the days are quiet, and the quiet is the point. You cannot hear the truth in a noisy room, and politics is the noisiest room there is.
The feed bit: the argument across the masthead
What I love most about this network, and what I try to honour from the editor’s chair, is that it refuses to think with one mind. On any given week the socialist desk is making a passionate case for the public ownership of half the economy, and the free-market desk is making an equally passionate case against it, and the satire desks are mocking the pretensions of both. I read all of it, and I commission all of it, because I hold an unfashionable belief: that an honest publication should be a place where the best version of each argument can be heard, and the reader trusted to judge.
The serious reporting on governance is sharpened, as ever, by the dull but essential record kept at parliament.uk and the wider historical context one can dig out of Britannica, and the satire is sharpened by the news. The two feed each other. A good satirical piece is often a more honest account of a political moment than the straight report, because it is willing to say the thing the straight report only implies. The editor’s job is to keep both in the paper, and to keep his own thumb off the scale.
The discipline of the open mind
This is harder than it sounds, because everyone, the editor included, would rather read the argument they already agree with. The discipline of the open mind is precisely that, a discipline, a daily refusal of the comfortable. I do not always manage it. But I try, from this chair, to run a paper that argues with itself in good faith, that lets the Marxist and the libertarian and the satirist share a masthead, and that treats the reader as an adult capable of weighing competing cases rather than a child to be told what to think. That, to me, is what political journalism, serious or comic, is finally for.
The week ahead: more reading, more commas
So the week ahead is what every week is: reading before writing, arguing with writers who are right, fussing over commas, and trying to keep the paper honest. Politics will continue to be the noisiest room in the building, the satire desks will continue to be the most useful people in it, and I will continue to believe, against a good deal of evidence, that an open mind and a well-placed comma can do more for a country than most of its politicians. The chair is the best seat in the house. I intend to keep reading from it.
On why the open paper matters now
I am aware that the open, argue-with-itself model of journalism I prize is unfashionable, in an age that increasingly wants its media to pick a side and stay there. But I have edited long enough to distrust any publication that always agrees with itself, because a paper that never surprises its own readers has stopped doing journalism and started doing reassurance. The value of a masthead that can run the socialist and the libertarian and the satirist side by side is precisely that it keeps the reader’s mind in motion, refuses to let any single worldview harden into the only one, and trusts the audience to do the difficult work of judgement. That trust is, I think, the most respectful thing a publication can offer its readers, and the most endangered. I will keep offering it from this chair, comma by comma, for as long as they let me.
For the argument conducted in jokes, I always end up at Private Eye, serious about not being serious.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/