What a load of fookin' nonsense

I can't be the only person born the wrong side of Birmingham to find the Northener, the Guardian's weekly roundup of 'the best of the Northern press', to be routinely offensive. This week's issue, posted 12th March, leads with this hilarious little pile of human interest:

A Salford-based academic claimed this week he had found the funniest whoopee cushion noise after more than 30,000 people voted in an online poll.

Are we seriously expected to believe that - one week after the 25th anniversary of the miners' strikes and days before two of British football's most decorated (and most Northern) teams, meet at Old Trafford in a top-of-the-table clash - this story is the most pressing issue on the Northern news agenda? Or is it simply another embarrassing misjudgement on the part of a publication keen to maintain superficial contact with its socialist origins?

As Raymond Williams pointed out, the British press is highly unusual in that it is one of the most metropolitan in the developed world. The giants of the mainstream American media, such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, do not even attempt to disguise their own regional provenance, or bias. At the same time at least one emerging media power, India, provides a healthy counter-example in that the country's three largest newspapers - The Times of India, The Hindu and the Telegraph - are published 1000 miles apart in New Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata respectively.

Britain's newspapers have ignored both of these devolutionary possibilities. No mainstream daily beside the Scotsman has operated outside the capital since 1964 when the Manchester Guardian moved south. At the same time, no plan to regionalise any title - to call the Times, for instance, the Times of London, as it is known abroad - is ever seriously mooted.

The implications of this run far deeper than you might imagine, and are at the same time far cruder. 'Oirish' imitations are out but the Gallaghers labour under routine stereotyping. Do they really say 'fookin' instead of fucking, when large portions of the population utter vowels in different ways? Isn't the very concept of a caricaturing a regional dialect logically at fault in a national publication, written in theory by people from all over the country, for people all over the country? Or, at least, shouldn't all accents be technically as imitable? The covert, and therefore dangerous, assumption at work here is that a home counties accent is normative - that old chestnut. A regional point of view is dressed up and passed off as a national one, made to represent the population at large.

The BBC - so long guilty of confusing 'England' with 'London' - is attempting to remedy this by relocating to Manchester. But the print media big-hitters will never follow the Corporation beyond the M25. Newspapers rely increasingly on advertising to survive, and as they move onto the web within the next decade, advertising will become the sole source of income for what, for many, is the sole source of information. In order to compete in financial terms, a media heavyweight needs to be operating in the national centre of consumption, leisure, banking, advertising ... in the capital of capital. It needs to target the most affluent of the population, the biggest spendthrifts, the biggest savers.

Just one other reason why the Guardian's tokenistic namechecking of its regional socialist roots - see, in addition to the Northener, the 'Comment is free' piffle and culture of C. P. Scott memorabilia - is so offensive. The Guardian has not, for a long time, been a newspaper which caters particularly well for the demands of the non-metropolitan news consumer. At the same time, it is no longer aimed at the committed anti-capitalist. True socialist newspapers, as Williams again points out, are now impossible - because who wants to advertise to those opposed to consumerism? As the excellent MediaLens blog has it:

We did not expect the Soviet Communist Party's newspaper Pravda to tell the truth about the Communist Party, so why should we expect the corporate press to tell the truth about corporate power?