Reg journo standards have risen
Andrew Orlowski was the reason I stopped reading The Register over a decade ago, having been a regular visitor for nearly a decade before that.
It wasn't his 'controversial' opinions that pushed me away - some weren't terribly badly argued - but instead the repeated publication of basic factual errors combined with an arrogant refusal to have them corrected. Which makes him sound like a Trump or a Johnson, so doubtless he fits right in at that bastion of Project Fantasy, the Telegraph.
And much like the aforementioned former Telegraph columnist and Prime Minister who was never very good at distinguishing fact from opinion, at El Reg Orlowski seemed to regard himself as being above piddly journalistic exercises like "checking sources", and it was no good offering assistance. Inconvenient facts were routinely censored from the comments. E-mails ignored. The final straw for me was an article he wrote objecting to support for unsupportable opinions ... hypocritical much?
IMHO, for The Register of old to be unable or unwilling to bring him to heel tainted the whole publication. The only communication I ever received relating to his plethora of errors was from another columnist who quietly let it be known that Orlowski's questionable standards were causing friction at Reg HQ but that it was politically impossible to shift him. The bean-counters may miss his clickbait, but I doubt his presence is mourned by professional journalists.
Have you worked it out yet? The "commentards" moniker was always just a ruse: simultaneously a distraction from his ongoing refusal to accept scrutiny, and an insult to those who would try. It was pure cowardice for Orlowski as a journalist to hold people to account while refusing to submit to those same standards, yet somehow he made a career out of such unfettered hypocrisy.
But now, I discover, Andrew Orlowski has gone. Some years ago, in fact. Good riddance to dead wood.
And so to rediscover El Reg.
