To be a journalist you need to be able to read and write. LibDems are too stupid.

Some at the Guardian outed themselves as Lib Dems at the general election, and trashed their readership because of it.
The problem is the a lot of Lib Dems are Tories or Labour who couldnt get selected or elected as that in their area. Their voters float, voting tatically or negatively as the mood swings and their core vote disappears, depending on how confused their party message is. It would be difficult for a journo to define themselves as being a Lib Dem because there is too little to define it, very little in the way of comparative peers and any policies that they havent already abcktracked on are touted by other parties who have or are pursuing them in Government already. Who would you readership be, other than Lib Dem bloggers, a few party members and other people wanting just to criticise what you said. Hmm, seems oddly familiar.

The liberal dems are a total
waste as a third party.Your
policies are the same as the
Labour party.Your love of the European Union.Mass immigration.The political
correct fascists.Soft on
law breakers.And against everything that the majority
of the British voters want.
I await the day when you are
no longer the third party and another party with a backbone replaces you.

Julian Glover is a former libdem - he's also a nasty right winger who is regularly b*ggered by a tory...kinda apt.

The reaction to the OG blog show just how out of touch OG is!!!!! Did they not get a wake up call at the last local election. I concur with AllSeeingEye. It is the voters the Lib Dems should be worried about.

Reading Olly Grender brings home to me how shallow I am. There was me worrying about the vicious destruction of people's livelihoods, about the fear & loneliness & wreckage attendant, about the hounding of the sick, the privatisation of the NHS, the privatisation of our universities, the abolition of state funding for arts & humanities tuition in those universities; there was me thinking Vince Cable (that lovely twinkly chap) warning the unions that if they go on strike the Coalition may well have to legislate to stop them just the slightest bit worrying ...

... & not for a moment had I paused to wonder: "Where are the Liberal Democrat journalists?"

Working on national newspapers, at the BBC & Sky probably. Unlike socialist writers whose work would inevitably be caricatured as 'extremist' & censored at source. I feel your pain Olly Grender - it's a terrible thing not knowing where the Liberal Democrat journalists are - & I'd like you to know I couldn't care less.

*It's a sick joke that the libdims are begging for more media space.
They are propping up the most rightwing extremist tory regime, who treates Clegg and his narcotised sycophants as a "useful"
tool to remain in power.
*The libdims will retreat back to obscurity, and hopefully become a politically irrelevant bunch of tu*ds.

Characteristically excellent post.
Where are the true pluralists rather than party apologists?

Pretty sure Julian Astle's contributions are also printed in the Telegraph.

I do love OG but can't resist pointing out that in the not too distant future, there may well be a few former Lib Dem MPs looking for gainful employment.

Perhaps as journalists?

ps - Olly, don't let that lippy Hyman fella talk over you on Newsnight. He sets a bad example to the kids

Lou - I won't defend government on that, we're all guilty of rank hypocrisy.

Take driving, most of us want to drive cars, but drive cars we have to accept that hundreds of people will almost certainly die each year due to road accidents. Implicitly we are saying that the benefit of driving is worth those deaths. Of course you could try and say that you're in favour of improving road safety, but in the end whilst we may bring down the death toll we know that some people will die. It's simply a price worth paying.

It's rank hypocrisy to accuse others of rank hypocrisy with a straight face!

The need for liberal democrat journalists will no doubt be considerably lessened after the next general election. I for one will be glad to see the back of the odious self seeking LD’s. The famous quote by Abraham Lincoln is particularly apt: LD’s take note: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. You have been warned!!!!!

the LibDem (journalists or otherwise) are probably trying to work out a way of saying they are Libdems without being ridiculed! Which is an impossible task for as long as they accept to prop up the 'Tory lead coalition'

Tom King@

Yes, the Lib Dems managed to scrape up just over 15% at the local elections in England.

In Wales and Scotland, where people are more sensible, it was very different.

The Lib Dems only scraped up 10.6% in the Welsh Assembly constituency vote and a meagre 8% on the regional list

In Scotland they achieved a woeful 7.9% contituency and 5.2% regional list.

In Tory areas you are left in Labour areas you are right.You try to be all things to all people until you get power and invariably you are Tory.The press and the now tabloid BBC give the right of centre far too many column inches.Maguire is a sorry replacement for the investigative journelists the mirror had before it became a comic.
After the next election I should,nt worry you can write your thoughts on the back of fag packet with your MP,s in the back of a taxi.If you do not get out of this neocon alliance nobody will want to listen to you anyway.

LDs are "propping up the most rightwing extremist tory regime"

...and yet one which still manages to be significantly to the left of the previous government.

.... they've all defected to Labour.Even Polly Toynbee. And if you had any sense Olly would as well. Lib Dems are fast becoming oxymorons with no definitive Handbook on what is to be a Lib Dem.

Maybe the reason there are either so few (or they're not ready to go public with their views) is because so much of the media is corporate owned. Also, it's well known that many outlets won't allow dissent in mnay forms. From presenters down to showing the truth about a public demonstration.

Can you name one progressive U.K. journalist?
Can you name one progressive talk presenter? In London, some stations used to have the "token progressive" on (usually at night or on weekends). This way management could say to listeners see, we're not biased! We listen to everybody!

Not true. Now, everything I hear is corporate and conservative. Rip everything and everyone "liberal". Listeners will eat that stuff up!

Not everyone.

Tell me Olly and what would they be preaching in these newspapers the facade of a leftish party or the reality of orange book economic and there alliance with Tory neocons.

Well, then, where are the UKIP, BNP, and Green journalists? They collectively have as much or more support than the Lib Dems.

Also why confine this article to political pluralism in the media? How about the lack of economic, cultural, legal, cosmic, scientific,philosophical, industrial relations, religious, value,classical, elite, educational and neo pluralisms? If we're going to have a pluralist media then let's make it really pluralist eh Olly.

It is not pluralism to have almost, if almost, exactly the same thing said by three sociologically indistinguishable people, who have in fact known each other very well indeed from a very early age indeed. It is neither here nor there that they happen to wear different coloured rosettes once every four or five years.

But as things stand, a party of government is exempt from an important form of scrutiny. No Lib Dem has a Fleet Street column. There is room for Charles Kennedy, Simon Hughes, Sir Menzies Campbell, Susan Kramer, Evan Harris, Olly Grender, Paddy Ashdown, Mark Oaten and others. Really, every national newspaper, except perhaps the Mirror Group ones (although, then again, why not?) and clearly the Murdoch ones, should have a resident Lib Dem. I repeat that this is because they need scrutiny.

Scrutiny of schemes to join the euro. Or to grant an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Or to abolish church schools. Or to raise the income tax threshold, but without the wholesale restructuring that would guarantee everyone a tax-free income of at least half national median earnings at the given time. Or to reverse the erosion of civil liberties, but without therefore restoring proper sentencing and proper prison regimes because we could once again have confidence in convictions.

Scrutiny of schemes to give the vote to prisoners. Or to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to appear legally in porn films that would then haunt them on the Internet for the rest of their lives. Or to advocate in this country openness, decentralisation and the election of everything, and that by means of STV, while also subscribing to European federalism.

Those, remember, are only the things that have managed to become party policy. Lib Dem columnists would give an insight into the milieu that produced such policies, into the ideas that circulate around them and provide their context, and thus into the minds and character of the people involved in that process. Where are they? Where is the scrutiny?

Ms Grender persists in her fantasy that the Lib Dems are important or worth saving as a party.

Grender says "Given that roughly one in five people have supported the Liberal Democrats",

Convenient use of past tense there by Grender.

Currently less than one in ten of voters are fans of the Orange Bookers. Friday's YouGov tracker showed a dismal 8% would vote for them in a Westminster election.

Maybe she should read the Guardian. Its editorial team seems jam packed with Cleggites and their constant apologism for the Tory poodles is losing them readers.

wasn't there once a lib dem journalist called vince cable? i wonder what happened to him?

i fear the problem is that when commenting on news, journalists need to be polemicists and i don't think the lib dems really stand for anything other than shifting positions after the tide has already turned.

the act of becoming a right wing party just as the neo liberal economic model is in the process of failing big time, is so behind trend, were it not so stupid it would be funny.

i think many of the above saner posts capture it, olly.

under clegg, especially, the Party that is supposed to be the "third option" has revealed itself as bankrupt, as pale blue as new labour and as dark blue as the current Tories on many issues.

the Party is unpopular because of its *policies* - and because it is allowing the neo-lib Tories to force through massively unpopular policies upon Britain.

ANY Lib-Dem journalist therefore, who wanted to support the Party, must begin by criticising it, the mark of a true friend and good person is to say that which is honest, even if it hurts the recipient. Although not to be merely destructive, but also to offer positive encouragement.

where are such journalists??

why would the corporate press give them space, and why would the samizdat publications TRUST a Lib-Dem, bearing in mind the Leadership?

where is the Lib-Dem media?