Fox succeeds where Wolfie failed

In the years following May 1968 more baby boomers than would care to admit it today hawked their Red Moles and Socialist Workers around the streets and factory gates trying to convince the working class socialist papers were a truthful alternative to the biased bourgeois press.

Their naivety and ineptitude were brilliantly satirized in the TV comedy Citizen Smith about Wolfie Smith, an unwashed but charming revolutionary in a Che Guevara beret, his long suffering sidekick and adoring girlfriend. The series set Robert Lindsay in the title role on the road to stardom.

Circulation figures show the socialist press failed to convince more than a few thousand. Maybe the sports coverage wasn’t good enough.

Now in the course of a few weeks coverage of the Tibet crisis, the western media has managed to convince an entire sub-continent that it is institutionally and irremediably slanted. It takes a lot to convince ordinary Chinese that their own wretched and censored media is preferable to the BBC, the New York Times and so on, but somehow the western press has managed it.

The Chinese people have famously long memories and this lesson will not be forgotten any time soon. I wonder if the scribblers realize quite what they’ve done.