The UK Guardian abruptly terminated its contract with Nafeez Ahmed after he wrote a piece entitled “IDF’s Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis”. Ahmed wrote a very detailed account of the termination. The Guardian’s justification was that he had written too many “non-environmental stories” and was therefore in breach of his agreement to cover “the geopolitics of environmental, energy and economic crises.” The key claims Ahmed made against the Guardian were

3)      The termination of his contract was illegal.

Thus far, the Guardian’s official response has greatly bolstered Ahmed’s claims by completely evading them:

“A Guardian News & Media spokesperson said: “Nafeez Ahmed is a freelance journalist who self-published blog posts on our environment blogging network for just over a year as a regular contributor. He has never been on the staff of the Guardian. His Guardian blog – Earth Insight – was about the link between the environment and geopolitics, but we took the decision to end the blog when a number of his posts on a range of subjects strayed too far from this brief. For the record, Jonathan Freedland played absolutely no part in this decision, as he has already confirmed.

Any suggestion of censorship is unfounded: all of Nafeez Ahmed’s blog posts remain on our website to this day. He is welcome to continue to pitch story ideas to us in the normal way.”

No effort is made to address the legality of the contract’s termination. It says nothing about Ahmed’s allegation that he had never been warned that he was straying from what he was supposed to write. It does not deny that Adam Vaughan explicitly approved a very similar article by Ahmed to the one that was the last straw for the Guardian. That’s an impressive zero out of three. Moreover, as the Media Lens editors clearly explained, Ahmed’s work has attracted an impressive following, and the article that provoked the termination was very widely read.

Ahmed did not accuse Freedland of ordering the termination. Freedland’s name came up because, according to Ahmed, Freedland has been described by former Guardian journalists an “unofficial gatekeeper” on the newspaper’s Israel-Palestine coverage. Freedland and the Guardian chose not to address the accuracy of that claim, but as an executive editor of the Guardian, and also a regular contributor to the Jewish Chronicle Online, it would be remarkable if Freedland did not exert a great deal of influence over coverage of that topic.

It appears that the Guardian simply found Ahmed’s writing too ideologically provocative.

If Nafeez Ahmed had not been willing to burn his bridges with the Guardian, he would be just another writer whose latest work quietly disappeared from its pages. Instead, like the Media Lens editors and former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook, Ahmed has decided to become a writer supported by his readers, not corporate advertisers. It’s an admirable approach, but what is desperately needed in the UK, USA and Canada is pressure on governments to erode the dominance of the corporate media. Governments like Canada’s and UK’s that already have large government owned news media should be bombarded with demands to bring them under more direct democratic control. Another useful idea (originally proposed by John Nichols and Robert McChesney and modified a bit by Dean Baker) is government supplied vouchers that any voting age citizen can use to direct funds to non-advertising outlets. It allows each voter, regardless of income, an equal say in how government money is directly towards non-corporate media. A $250 per voter subsidy in the USA would provide a massive boost to independent writers.

I could not have blamed Ahmed had he chosen to keep quiet, salvage some kind of relationship with the Guardian, and maybe get an occasional op-ed into its pages in the future. He could have silently hoped that changes among the Guardian’s editors would give him more space. It seems the Guardian editors are accustomed to treating writers this badly and were expecting that kind of reaction from Ahmed.

There are simple reasons why the most influential people at the Guardian will always be the most politically timid or reactionary. For one thing, corporate ads pay most of the bills. Murray McDonald reviewed Guardian editorials going back to 1821. He showed that “much of the newspaper’s venom has been reserved for opposition movements. The Guardian had a particular contempt for anti-imperialist movement, pouring scorn on Third World nationalists like Lumumba and Nasser, advocating military intervention across the globe” and that its editors have generally been “…deeply hostile to the working class, especially when they have taken matters into their own hands…”

For several years (2006 to 2012) one reactionary and dishonest reporter, Rory Carroll, supplied about 75% of the Guardian’s output about Venezuela under its former president Hugo Chavez. How does that happen without a lot of support from the top?

The Guardian’s progressive reputation has depended on a handful of writers like Seumas Milne, Owen Jones and less frequent contributors like Tariq Ali, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot (op-eds by the last two have become far less frequent over the past several months). Glenn Greenwald, who, though he only briefly had a contract with the Guardian, helped it get a significant amount of credit for publishing Ed Snowden’s revelations about the NSA. Similarly, the Guardian association with Wikileaks, though it eventually degenerated into a bitter feud, helped solidify its reputation as newspaper that seriously challenges the powerful. It’s an entirely underserved reputation, a consequence of how desperately many people welcome any alternative to the hard right media no matter how pitifully inadequate.

The strong political movements required to abolish war, end environmental disasters and eradicate poverty will be ruthlessly attacked by the liberal media. That will be a sign that those movements have finally arrived.