On 3 Feb, 16:36, Tom Anderson wrote:

On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Martin Petrov wrote:
No wonder the Guardian is losing readers every year.

Note - it's a "comment" in the newspaper, rather than an editorial or
some such.

Weeelll, not quite. The writers/bloggers/whatever on Comment is Free are
essentially columnists - they're published online, rather than on paper,
but they're selected, paid and edited by the Guardian. In this particular
case, Nigel Willmott is also the real paper's letters editor (he also
appears to be a major Acorn Archimedes nerd - good man!). I don't think
you can assume anything he says is the Graun's official party line, but
the paper is ultimately responsible for his output.

Mind you, their general policy on CiF does seem to be to encourage the
writing of brain-shatteringly absurd pieces (usually from some kind of
caricatured hard-left/progressive position), presumably so that the
ensuing storm of controversy will attract page views.


Which is one of the reasons I generally steer clear of getting
embroiled in it and sites like it - the engineered controversy aspect
does often seem rather blatant, and it in turn attracts a certain type
of comment and/or commentator. And at the end of the day after the
shouting has finished and the debate has died down I'm not really sure
how much the world has actually changed. That said, I have been
impressed by some of the well argued and reason comments thereon, so I
guess if my opinion is informed or changed by them then perhaps my
world may have changed a little. Though I don't actually read it that
often - I haven't read the piece the OP refers to (though I suspect I
could write it albeit in a rather less literate manner), basically
because I just can't be bothered to get worked up about it.

I have to admit when I first came across people banging on about 'CiF'
I wondered why there was this interest in toilet cleaners. There's a
joke in there somewhere...