Editor steers paper further to the Left

I have long held the view that The Age is the most left-wing newspaper in Australia; in a sense, its culture is set by [cartoonist] Michael Leunig. I have spent most of my life in Melbourne and I am very familiar with The Age.

During the time when left-wing views were more prevalent than they are today, The Age's ethos worked well enough in a commercial sense. However, Australia is more conservative than it was in The Age's heady days in the 1970s and it seems to me that, for its commercial success, the paper needs to be better balanced and less cynical. My current concern is that the appointment of Andrew Jaspan - a man of the Left, judged by his performance on The Observer in London and The Sunday Herald in Scotland - has moved The Age even further to the Left.

Jaspan is the editor of The Age and free to can any columnist he doesn't like. The rest of us are free not to buy it and perhaps, more pointedly, to ring up the paper's advertisers and explain why we won't be patronising their shops and wares until they find a better vehicle for promoting them.