Madeleine Bunting has been a friend of mine, if not a particularly close one, for about ten years now, ever since we were rival religious affairs correspondents. I don’t always like what she writes or agree with it. But she’s a decent person, she’s very smart and hard working, and she tries to get her stories right. These are all quite rare qualities in a journalist. Talk to her and you learn stuff.<\/p>\n\n
So the shit<\/a>storm of derision and abuse which has greeted her attempts to write about the Enlightenment<\/a> on the Guardian’s<\/em> comment site has been really unpleasant to watch. I know she hated it too. What is particularly nasty is the way that she is referred to<\/a> as “Maddy” by some of her attackers. Every time I see the word, I flinch. “But this is my friend,”<\/em> I think, with a sense of shock and wrongness that must be more familiar to the victims of journalism than its practitioners.<\/p>\n\n What has she done to provoke such nastiness, except to suggest that, just possibly, we aren’t as smart as we think we are?<\/p>\n\n I must get the arseholes essay finished and popped into the paper.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Madeleine Bunting has been a friend of mine, if not a particularly close one, for about ten years now, ever since we were rival religious affairs correspondents. I don’t always like what she writes or agree with it. But she’s … Continue reading