From Mr Ian Aitken Sir: Would somebody at your office
please chuck a bucket of cold water over your 'Media studies' columnist. He is clearly in an extremely fevered state and badly needs cooling down. The idea that a few grumpy remarks about the Daily Telegraph in a prime ministerial speech, together with some rude comments on the Daily Mail by Mr Gerald Kaufman, somehow add up to a totalitarian attempt to stifle opposition in the press is wildly over the top (Media stud- ies, 11 December).
Stephen Glover adds that he is not sure that anything like it has happened before 'in this century'. Really? How about Mr (as he then was) Norman Tebbit's vendetta against the BBC, culminating in his disgraceful attack on Kate Adie? Yet even Mr Tebbit was entitled to his view, and it certainly didn't amount to an antidemocratic bid to suppress dissent. He was just trying to put the frighteners on Aunty Beeb. Happily, Aunty wasn't frightened — and neither, I suspect, is the Telegraph nor the Mail.
Mr Glover confesses to writing a column for the Daily Mail for the past 18 months, and claims that the house journal of the Blackshirts and the publisher of the Zinoviev letter has not grown perceptibly more hostile to the government during that period. I wonder if he missed the issue of Monday 6 December, which contained a poisonously personal onslaught on Alastair Campbell. But then, perhaps the piece was the Mail's spirited rejoinder to these alleged attempts to 'crush' it?
Ian Aitken
52a North Hill,
London N6
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