Matthew Syed is a Times journalist. Two days ago his article on the Washington DC collision Trump’s scapegoating threatens the entire basis of aviation safety (£) was published, excoriating The Donald’s comments on DEI initiatives at the FAA, and casting serious doubt on the possibility that those initiatives could have been responsible for the collision.

People who don’t read The Times tend to assume it’s a right-leaning paper. They couldn’t be more wrong. The best description I’ve ever heard of it is that it’s “achingly liberal”, as are many (most?) of its readers, and the comments sections reliably reflect that. The paper has employed for many years the odious feminist (I repeat myself) Caitlin Moran – affectionately nicknamed “Moron” by colleagues, I’ve been told – as a twice-weekly columnist. She and her partner have two daughters. In her book How to be a Woman she revealed that she became pregnant during a holiday in Cyprus, not having used any contraception. She had an abortion and revealed the child she’d killed was male.

Comments on the article were almost all supportive and predictably anti-Trump for voicing his opinion that DEI initiatives were probably the cause of the accident. I pitched in with some comments of my own, supporting Trump’s opinion, and for my troubles got some flak and a little support.

I understand that journalists frequently read the comments on their pieces, one that comes to mind is Julie Burchill when she writes for The Spectator, using a pseudonym but everyone knows it’s her. But few journalists do this, so I was surprised that Matthew Syed had replied to a commenter, and I replied to his comment (below). I’ve had no response from him, what are the chances?

—————————-

If you’d like email notifications of our new blog pieces, please enter your email address in the box near the top of the right-hand column and click ‘Subscribe’.

We shall shortly be posting this piece on our X channel.

Our YouTube channel is here.