How Not to Launch a Newspaper
Last year, at the end of second semester, a curious publication found itself in the hands of students entering the library in the run-up to exam season. While anyone unfortunate enough to be bestowed with this incoherent attempt at a newspaper could hardly assess it at first glance, closer inspection proved it a conservative (or perhaps more accurately, far right) mess of articles. As one anonymous student recalls: "Standing directly behind [The Saint’s library handout] were another group who pushed a copy of their ‘new independent paper’ into my hands as I went past. I had no idea who they were or what they were giving me… I was less than pleased to discover it was a conservative paper with poorly written attempts at journalism inside."
The paper's mere premise set off multiple dogwhistles. It proclaimed itself The Martyr, recalling the historical martyrs of St Andrews. Its ‘mission’, the penultimate page argued, as if having a purpose more providential than deluded, was to ‘articulate and preserve the Principles of Western Civilization’. So enamoured with the false notion that conservatives are somehow attacked and oppressed, these authors can imagine themselves being burnt at the stake for these ‘principles’. Wallowing in their own self pity, this was already a call for readers to be cautious.
Brutalism and Beauty
It would require an article vastly larger than this one to fully illuminate all the issues of The Martyr’s content, so just a few will have to suffice.
Under the article ‘New Voice Auld Ideas’, the writer takes a swing at non-traditional architecture in St Andrews, namely the brutalist Andrew Melville Hall, which has apparently ‘aged like fine milk’. Brutalism – it certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Yet, to regard it as a kind of objective antithesis to pure aesthetic beauty would disregard that old adage: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To claim that an absolute beauty is to be found solely in aged architecture is downright false; Brutalism’s tempered rejection of frivolity is an art form of its own.
Unlike the ‘magnificence of the aged and antique’, the new, the groundbreaking, is to be ashamed of, forgotten about! The Martyr appeals to conservative neophobia, forgetting the very fact that our diverse student culture, bustling with novel insights, is what truly makes St Andrews attractive!
Politicising Pavement
Meanwhile, an ostensibly innocent article about walking on the pavement. It appears so innocuous one begins to question why it is even in a conservative newspaper. Then, one reads to the end and discovers why. The explanation for domestic students being ‘too polite’ to complain of chaotic walking habits is that the obsequious British ‘gave away a global empire’. Such a simple statement robs the agency of former colonies away, their decolonial and nationalist movements ignored in a vague tragedianism that Britain willfully let go of what ought to be its own.
Then, the anti-migration rhetoric running through the article is now unveiled. People migrating from all over the world to a town will, apparently, inevitably cause chaos: ‘order never stands a chance on Market Street’. Disorganised walking patterns are ascribed to a ‘failed social experiment’ caused by people of diverse nationalities ‘[bringing] their own flow of traffic with them’. Would it not be a more logical explanation that St Andrews’ medieval streets simply didn’t anticipate a twenty-first century population size and modern vehicles?
‘The pavement of St Andrews isn’t a pavement, it’s a middle school dancefloor’. It isn't x, it’s y – how shockingly clichéd, even if not AI generated. As if any chaos is not due to the sheer footfall one would expect in any street bustling with shops and next to a university, but a peculiarity of international migration.
The Martyr – Dead for Good?
I am not one to dissuade beginners to the town’s writing scene, even if I disagree politically. Yet, nothing can excuse a slew of inaccuracies and half-heartedly veiled extremist views. In a university environment where the student body generally leans to the left (given last year’s uproar against Reform Society), I fear that any prospective conservative newspapers would veer down the same route of self-victimhood. I’m well aware that perhaps any publicity is good publicity. Perhaps this very article will inspire The Martyr to continue publishing. If it continues with the same quality as its inaugural issue, however, then I doubt it will win much praise. For the sake of saving itself from embarrassment, if nothing else, then it would be best for The Martyr to stay dead.
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