{"id":142455,"date":"2014-12-04T21:56:28","date_gmt":"2014-12-04T21:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=142455"},"modified":"2014-12-04T21:56:28","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T21:56:28","slug":"guardian-axed-nafeez-ahmeds-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/guardian-axed-nafeez-ahmeds-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Guardian axed Nafeez Ahmed\u2019s blog"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Jonathan Cook<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Nafeez Ahmed\u2019s account of the sudden termination of his short-lived contract to write an environment blog for the Guardian is depressingly instructive \u2014 and accords with my own experiences as a journalist at the paper.<\/p>\n<p>Ahmed is that rare breed of journalist who finds stories everyone else either misses or chooses to overlook; he regularly joins up the dots in a global system of corporate pillage. If the news business were really driven by news rather than a corporate-friendly business agenda, publications would be beating a path to his door.<\/p>\n<p>Instead he has been mostly ploughing a\u00a0lonely furrow as a\u00a0freelance journalist, bypassing the media gatekeepers by promoting himself on social media, and placing his articles wherever a window briefly opens. His 43,000 followers on Twitter are testament to his skills as a journalist \u2014 skills, it seems, that are in short demand even at the bastions of liberal journalism.<\/p>\n<p>That neglect looked like it might finally be remedied\u00a0last year when the Guardian gave him a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/earth-insight\" target=\"_blank\">blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s be clear: the Guardian is now a raucous market-place of opinion \u2014 its model for monetising the mostly voluntary labour of desperate journalists, writers, academics and lobby groups. The paper calls it \u201cComment is Free\u201d \u2014 free for the Guardian, that is.<\/p>\n<p>But it is certainly not \u201cfree\u201d in the sense of \u201cfree expression\u201d, as I know only too well from my many run-ins with its editors, both from my time on staff there and from my later experiences as a freelance journalist (more below). The Guardian\u2019s website covers a spectrum of \u201cmoderate\u201d, meaning \u00a0conventional, opinion from right to left, with a couple of genuinely progressive staff writers \u2014 currently Seumas Milne and Owen Jones \u2014 there to offer the illusion of real pluralism.<\/p>\n<p>Recruiting Ahmed was therefore a risky move. He is a voice from the genuine left, and one\u00a0too independent to control. The Guardian did not offer\u00a0him a column, or the more interesting \u2014 and suitable \u2014 position\u00a0of investigative journalist, a platform that would have given him the opportunity and resources to explore the biggest and most under-reported story of our era: the connection between corporate greed and the destruction of the life-support systems necessary for our continued existence on the planet.<\/p>\n<p>Instead he got a minor leg-up: a raise out of the morass of CiF contributors to his own Guardian blog. Rather than\u00a0waste inordinate time and energy on arm-twisting the Guardian\u2019s ever-cautious editors, he was able to publish his own posts with minimal interference. And that was the beginning of his downfall.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2014-12-04\/why-the-guardian-axed-nafeez-ahmeds-blog\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jonathan Cook Nafeez Ahmed\u2019s account of the sudden termination of his short-lived contract to write an environment blog for the Guardian is depressingly instructive \u2014 and accords with my own experiences as a journalist at the paper. Ahmed is that rare breed of journalist who finds stories everyone else either misses or chooses to overlook; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":142456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1615],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-142455","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-uk-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}