The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

News 2020

All the latest, very early

The deputy editor of the Nearly Independent and Upper Middle-Class Advertiser, Tristram Wright-Wrigley, has offered a robust defence of his newspaper's environmental policy and his own controversial condemnation of "non-sensible environmentalists" in last Sunday's edition.

"It may seem inconceivable in this day and age, but there are still people who apparently believe that radical changes in society somehow necessitate radical changes in people's behaviour," Mr Wright-Wrigley said today.

His original article was a response to complaints by extreme environmentalist pressure groups that the Nearly Independent and Upper Middle-Class Advertiser was not doing enough to publicise the possibility of climate change due to carbon emissions from vehicles.

In his article, Mr Wright-Wrigley condemned this point of view as "naive" and pointed out that almost all car manufacturers were researching more enviro-scrupulous methods of selling their products.

"If we as a newspaper tried to exert pressure on these people, instead of engaging with them by simply taking their money and carrying their advertisements, they would take their trade elsewhere and we would have to double our cover price," wrote Mr Wright-Wrigley. "And the British public would lose one of the few remaining bastions of genuine press independence, of free speech and uncompromising truth, which are left to it in these troubled times."

However, some environmental groups, which Mr Wright-Wrigley had castigated as "non-sensible", have protested about the article. They claim that as long as newspapers depend on advertising for revenue, they are "compromised" in their efforts to tell the truth.

"Idealism is all very well," said Mr Wright-Wrigley today, "but one has to live in the real world. Frankly, if the world is heating up - something that is still unproven according to many scientists at General Motors and other respectable sponsors - but if it is heating up, there isn't much one newspaper can do about it as long as we live in the kind of society we live in at present."

Switching on the air-conditioning with a languid secretary, he gave an easy smile. "I'm sure our readers are intelligent enough to appreciate the dangers of climate change without being lectured with a lot of extremist propaganda before they've even driven to work," he said.

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