Media 40: FT report on Greek election result

Is Mr Barber hoping to move to a populist newspaper?

After presenting the Greek general election as a “duel between reason and unreason” (FT, January 20), Tony Barber in Athens – in language unworthy of the Financial Times – records the success of Syriza in the Greek general election.

His selection of emotive phrases in the first five paragraphs, calculated to diminish the new government’s image, includes:

• ‘odd couple of Greek politics’ – to be translated according to the readers’ prejudices;

• its coalition: ‘an unholy alliance’;

• ‘eastern Mediterranean bedfellows’;

• ‘the apparent madness of Mr Tsipras in jumping under the sheets with Panos Kammenos, leader of the Independent Greeks’;

• ‘muzzle Syriza ultra-leftist factions’ – mad dog implication

• ‘Europe’s radical left’ – more in the offing, a threat.

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Mr Barber then pulls himself together and delivers the sort of dispassionate analysis of the difficulties facing the new Greek government, which is consistent with the FT’s usual approach.

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