Apropos Nothing

If you happened across the widely-reported story of Max Gogarty and his travel blog, you might be interested to hear how the situation turned out: the blog got pulled. This was the only possible outcome, unless young Max had

1. a strong masochistic streak, or
2. a talent for travel writing so unprecedented that his critics would be silenced as soon as he stepped off the plane in Bangkok

Alas we’ll never know because that one article was as far as he got.

To recap, Max Gogarty is a smug middle-class 19 year old from somewhere in smug middle-class North London who is currently on a smug middle-class gap year trip to Thailand and was to write a smug middle-class blog about his smug middle-class experiences on the smu…no, that’s unfair…on The Guardian’s website. This is the kind of fast track to a journalistic career that your average media studies graduate would suck an untold amount of cock for.

Unfortunately, after writing his first utterly unremarkable missive (describing events before departure, what he expects might happen over there and, for general background, how great his life is), someone made an observation in the comments section. To quote from the Observer’s story linked to above:

The astonishing reaction was provoked when surfers spotted that he had the same surname as Paul Gogarty, a travel writer who occasionally contributes to the Guardian. Readers presumed he was a privileged public school boy whose father had secured him the blog spot and whose gap-year travels were being funded by the newspaper.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Observer is the sister paper of the Guardian and that they rarely step on each other’s toes, notice the bias here. Readers didn’t spot that he was indeed the son of Paul Gogarty [*], they spotted that he had the same surname. It becomes obvious further down that their suspicions were spot on, but they can’t quite bring themselves to say that because frankly, it doesn’t sound good, does it?

Although he didn’t go to public school and his trip wasn’t paid for by The Guardian, these were not at all the main gripes in the comments  section (which are still online for perusal at the time of writing but I doubt they will be left there indefinitely). There is only one thing that people were really pissed off about, one thing that got mentioned again and again, and that is the fact that his daddy had clearly got him the gig.

On how the blog came to be commissioned, Gogarty Snr had the following to say:

He said his son was invited on to a young writers’ group at London’s Royal Court Theatre, and from there he began writing for Skins before being offered the travel blog. ‘There is no nepotism. I hardly ever write for the Guardian,’ said Gogarty. ‘He is not an attention seeker. He is just bright and 19 and middle-class – and that’s a crime in Britain.’

No, it’s not a crime. What is a crime is when someone gets a job not on merit, but because of who their daddy happens to be. To suggest “there is no nepotism” (and not elaborate) is to imply that a father and son both working as travel writers for the same paper is a mere coincidence. This is a massive insult to everyone’s intelligence and something The Observer should be ashamed to report with a straight face.

The moral of the story is if you’re going to take advantage of daddy’s media connections, get him to get you a job for a newspaper other than the one he himself writes for. So tough shit there, Max. Let me send you a link to a great site called WordPress.

NB I can afford to be harsh about this guy because this blog is going to turn utterly awesome when I go on my holidays but I bet I still won’t have the Guardian knocking on my door.

[*] In fact they did, by also unearthing a travel article about Thailand in the Guardian archives written by Gogarty Snr.  in which he mentions his son Max- so he’d actually been there already five years ago