The Daily Telegraph
I guess you are all waiting to hear my views on the new and improved Daily Telegraph, which I have started to purchase again on the strength of Martin Newland's interview in Monday's Guardian.Overall I was quite impressed. The news coverage is solid, if perhaps still a little idiosyncratic, but refreshing free of bias (normally -- the City pages talk of 'slashed growth forecasts' when in fact it went from 3.2% to 3.0%). The sports coverage is good, although I preferred it when it wasn't a separate section. The City coverage is so-so.
The letters page is much like the Guardian's, not only in that it's filled with what Private Eye calls 'Mike Giggler' letters, but also because it sounds like something written by Michael Moore. Example: "The resignation of Colin Powell bodes ill for the rest of the world, and leaves a cabal of neo-Conservatives of the ilk of President Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney in a cabinet facing the global challenges of the future".
Where the paper really falls down of course is in its columnists. The normally solid Andrew Marr writes a column in which the first section is utterly incomprehensible. I presume regular readers might have a clue what he is going on about, but if this is the normal stuff he writes there must be very few of these left.
Compared to Janet Daley however Marr is sense itself. Newland was rightly happy that he had got rid of Barbara Amiel, but god knows why he keeps Daley on. Here is an example of her wing-nuttery from today's column, which is so idiotic on so many levels I'll just reprint it without comment:
...I do believe that the democratic experiment in Continental Europe, begun just over 200 years or so ago, is coming to a close.
posted by Matthew @ 11/17/2004 09:45:00 AM
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