Since I posted a story about The Spectator’s malicious attack on Vaughan Smith and our Frontline Club that I have the privilege of chairing, there have been some developments that I wanted to share with you.
The Spectator’s Toby Young who had not only encouraged James Kirchick to write his vicious “take down” of Smith and the Club but is the editor of record on the piece. After our protests that this had been a premeditated hatchet job, Young agreed to posting Vaughan’s right to reply on The Spectator website. But after Vaughan submitted his piece, Young insisted on shortening it and decided to edit it himself.
Vaughan rightly refused and has turned to other journalists to publish it.
The Guardian’s media critic Roy Greenslade upon reading what The Spectator has published and seeing the pre-publication exchange of emails between Kirchick and Young wrote a blog about it. Then today he has also published Vaughan’s right to reply piece.
Greenslade has been a newspaper editor himself and also is a professor of journalism at City University. He couldn’t ask for a better example of failed irresponsible journalism to discuss with his students.
Attack on the Frontline Club was ‘a politically motivated hit job’
Vaughan Smith rejects Spectator Life magazine’s criticisms and explains why he and his wife founded a club dedicated to war correspondents http://goo.gl/QAZtyC
