![Note the hypertext link in the upper right-hand corner.](https://i0.wp.com/bradwarthen.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/royal-baby.jpg?resize=619%2C371&ssl=1)
Note the hypertext link in the upper right-hand corner.
The Guardian today is providing readers online with a “Not a Royalist?” button, which they can click and get less coverage of the royal baby that’s on the way as we speak.
Which is really kind of irritating. I mean, what a time to bring politics into the thing. Oh, the Duchess is having a baby, so let’s grouse about how we hate the monarchy… Like labor isn’t enough of a hassle as things are.
There a certain sort of Brit who suffers from a kind of Jacobin insecurity, who feels compelled to signal to the world at every opportunity that While you may think everyone in what you imagine to be Jolly Old England is all gaga over this baby, and gets misty-eyed about the royals in general, I, for one, am not one of those sheep. I am a forward-thinking modern. Apparently, some editor at The Guardian is that sort of Brit. Michael Palin used to do a pretty good job of sending up that type of pretentious twit.
It bugs me because… hey, we know The Guardian’s political leanings, but it’s still a newspaper, and a good one. And saying to readers, we’ll give you news according to your personal political prejudices kind of undermines what remains of the idea of the newspaper as something that embodies the idea that there is such a thing as news that is news regardless what you think of it.
A newspaper should stand for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
It’s the political nature of this that bugs me. Left and right in this country, and probably in that one, can already wrap themselves in a cocoon that contains only facts that fits their own prejudices, and that is why we’re so polarized today. It’s a very destructive thing. Newspapers, to the extent that we still have them, should be islands on which we can stipulate that certain things are news whether we want to hear about them or not. They should be touchstones of reality, a place where we can check in once a day and agree on a few basic points before spending the rest of the 24 hours arguing.
Now when you get beyond politics, I’ll admit that there’s a certain appeal to this idea. For instance, it would be great to be able to hit a button that would immediately reduce football coverage to a reasonable level (at least when it isn’t football season), or do the same with celebrity gossip.
To me, not being one of Her Majesty’s subjects, celebrity gossip is the category into which royal babies fit. At least, at the level of coverage we’ve seen. The birth of the first child of the first child of the prince of Wales actually is news, of the “take note of” variety. We just don’t have to go on and on about it.
But that’s a matter of taste, not politics.
I don’t know how many takers there are for the “republican” option among The Guardian‘s readers today. Even if you click on the “not a royalist” button, when you scroll down you see that the top story is “Royal baby: Kate admitted to hospital for birth – live coverage.”
And I don’t think that means people are necessarily “royalists.” They’re just interested. It’s not a political statement. Unless you’re just really, really pretentious.