Alan Rusbridger: The Trouble with Whistle Blowers

Tougher than he looks Alan Rusbridger

Okay, the Phantom admits he likes the Guardian on line newspaper.  For a long time, he did not know why, exactly, he liked it, but he found the stories confirmed many suspicions he harbored about the world.

But now, in a piece in The New Yorker he learns more than he ever really wanted to know about what goes on at The Guardian.

It turns out, the paper is not like any other, in the sense it really does not need to make a profit: It is supported by a trust fund, and the whole goal, financially, is to simply lose money less rapidly than it is currently doing, and to sustain itself for as long as it can, until it bleeds its trust fund dry.

This allows it to pursue stories like the publication of articles based on material released by Mr. Edward Snowden, which showed the NSA spies on Americans by tracking their cell phone data. Presumably, conversations of ordinary Americans are simply too dreary and boring to warrant actually listening to them, so the NSA simply tracks who called whom when and for how long.  Listening to American cell phone conversations would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and would  require heroic levels of stoicism we cannot expect even from America's most heroic heroes. 

Anyone who has ever had to ride from Washington, D.C. to New York when all the seats in the quiet car are filled,  and been stuck for over 4 hours, listening to the intensely inane cell phone conversations  knows this form of torture would be too much to ask, even of intrepid National Security Agency agents. 

One learns, to one's chagrin,  all about Buffy's troubles with Jimmy, and Jimmy's room mate and about  Buffy's job, the accounts she has to visit in New York, the dress she almost bought, the shoes she saw at Jimmy Choo's , where she ate lunch and what she ate and what was wrong with it, and how drunk she got last Friday at some club,  and we just passed Wilmington, and whatever goes on in Wilmington?...We are spared no detail.

So, when the grand master editor of The Guardian was handed the treasure trove of information about the NSA listening in or not listening in, but at least tracking all these conversations, he had a special room at The Guardian done up and three new computers put into that room loaded with Mr. Snowden's stuff, and to get into any of them, you needed three passwords and only one password was given to each of three people and, oh, it was very James Bond.  On these computers was the Snowden stuff. 

And to make it even more important and clandestine sounding, there was a gay reporter in Brazil, an American ex-pat and a sultry woman documentary maker and some other guy who sounds pretty nerdy, but he had won a Pulitzer prize, which lends a little gravitis if not veritas to the whole fan-dangle. 

It is all compared with that great whistle blower scoop, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers which showed, among other things, the war in Vietnam was a bad idea, which anyone who watched Walter Cronkite during those years already knew four years before the Times published Mr. Ellsberg's revelations. 

But the big revelation from The Guardian's efforts at walking in Mr. Ellsberg's tracks has been, so far, the revelation that the American government, through its clandestine super secret agency, is tracking cell phone conversations.

But, really, did anyone  ever think their cell phone conversations were secret or confidential?  After blathering for hours on the train, walking down the street, in the park, shouting into the damn things, annoying everyone for blocks around, is there anything secret about cell phone conversations? If only.

The major revelation about all this, as far as the Phantom is concerned, is that the grand wizard editor of the Guardian, which loses tens of millions every year, this editor makes almost a million dollars a year, although recently, in a grand gesture, he accepted a pay cut of around $100,000 a year, just to show how very committed he is to the special kind of journalism possible at a not-for-profit news organization.

This wizard editor, Mr. Alan Rusbridger is an Oxbridge type, who plays piano recitals of Chopin for select friends,  and who has written a play about Beethoven,  and who, in order to be the grand wizard, had to write a "manifesto" no less, which the other board members had to embrace before he could be made grand wizard.

Of Mr. Rusbridger, it is said, "His physical appearance doesn't tell you how tough he is," which is a good thing, because, as you can see from his photo, he does not look very tough at all, so it is good to know.

In fact, reading this long, fascinating profile by Ken Auletta, the word "effete" kept drifting up before the Phantom's eyes. Here is how people in England cash in on their long tribulation in private (called public) schools.  They call each other tough and brilliant and accomplished and really very upper crust, first rate sort of chap, and they latch on to huge salaries  which from all appearances,  appear to be unconscionable, and they play Chopin for their friends.