The Media Column: 'Editors should consider how much space to devote to opinions they dislike'

The playwright Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as "a nation talking to itself". In the late 1990s, when I was responsible for the opinion pages of The Scotsman, I interpreted his view as meaning that a newspaper with a clear editorial policy had a duty to stimulate conversation by publishing columnists who disagreed with it.

Miller made his comment in 1961, when the thought was more contentious than it sounds. Politics was less fluid. Parties relied upon substantial unwavering support. Election campaigns sought to convert a small minority of the electorate who were not wedded to a class-based notion of identity. Many newspaper readers were invulnerable to persuasion.

Life was more straightforward for newspaper editors. The rigidity of political loyalties limited the need for disparate views within individual titles. Each newspaper sought to speak for a specific community of opinion. Commercial success could be achieved by supplying arguments that confirmed the prejudices of readers. If Conservatives scrutinised The Guardian and Communists took The Daily Telegraph as well as the Morning Star, it was only because their leaders advised them to "know what the enemy is thinking", and not because they anticipated encountering columns with which they agreed.

In recent years, the convergence of party-political debate on the centre ground has reduced the potency of arguments between ideological families and replaced them with internecine disputes within them. At The Scotsman, I misjudged the speed with which that would happen. I assumed that the advent of devolved government would make pro-devolution readers receptive to arguments against it. Perhaps that was not what Arthur Miller meant. It was certainly not what the Scottish nation wanted to discuss.

But the notion that newspapers should treat their readerships as coherent and predictable bodies of opinion has certainly been shattered now. Few events have confirmed that more emphatically than war in Iraq. Ideological families have been scattered to the winds. Some Guardian readers supported the war. A similar proportion of Daily Telegraph loyalists opposed it. The Daily Mirror misjudged its constituency dramatically.

This diversification of opinion within ideological tribes has given new relevance to a particular type of columnist: the hostile voice hired to write in opposition to the editorial line. Independent readers will be familiar with two of the best in the business: Bruce Anderson and Johann Hari. For the past few months, each has stuck to his post, arguing the case for military force against Saddam Hussein with as much passion as the leader column has contradicted them.

Promoting the arguments of writers who bluntly contradict what a newspaper professes to believe is not a new idea, but the emphasis is changing . Titles that have embraced the ideal of a true internal dialectic now do more than simply permit the odd burst of dissent. They give hostile voices equality of status with the collective line.

The Independent has achieved an impressive catholicity of tone by adopting this approach. On the right, Boris Johnson of The Spectator has done it well. His editorship has been marked by a willingness to deploy talents, such as Rod Liddle and even George Galloway, whom his predecessors would have considered bitter enemies.

Johnson's willingness to provoke has come close to producing Arthur Miller's ideal, and the experiment has worked in terms of circulation and profile, rendering The Spectator a surprising read and a clear winner against the left-wing New Statesman.

With circulations flagging, other editors may be wise to consider how much space they should devote to opinions they dislike and the manner in which they do it. Old certainties in international relations have collapsed. A renewed focus on domestic politics will soon reveal that the traditional left-right divide over the role of the public services is redundant too. Rendering this agenda exciting will demand a new willingness to promote heresy in newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, and not just in the form of whimsy or gossip.

Britain is reacting to the tedium of homogenised political orthodoxy. The national conversation is becoming a chorus of dissonant voices. Newspapers that encourage their opinion pages to say the previously unsayable may discover that they are not creating a trend, but simply recognising one. Doing it well is going to require the appearance of new hostile voices in historically monotheistic opinion pages. Scots might even be willing to celebrate journalistic hostility to their parliament. If turnout in next week's devolved elections is below 50 per cent, they certainly should.

timlckhrst@aol.com