I interviewed Wei here in London and offered them a long and substantial interview with him. Not interested. The Times was the only paper that did not cover his arrival in this city.
From the audience: How can you talk like this? Are you going to have a job to go back to? What do you say in response?
Mirsky: I am not afraid of them and I think they're not afraid of me. They deny it. They say it's just a coincidence.
But the problem is that I know the inside of the paper very well, and chief subs and people like that say: "Jonathan, why do you bother?"
But look, I'm too old and too famous for them to do something terrible to. And I can't do anything to them. Their answer to everything is: "We have doubled our circulation in the last five years. It is the biggest broadsheet jump in circulation in the history of the cosmos, and doesn't complain. We have changed our paper. It is now more youthful, more this, more that. That's what pays your salary."
It is part of the general junkification of the paper, but in this case it has this political component.
From the audience: Why did Murdoch decide in the middle of May to put the screws on the editor of the Times? Has it affected his other papers, for instance, The Australian, or is it just the Times?
Mirsky: I have a theory about what happened at the Times and it is the "Enough Already" theory. They hired me knowing what my views on China were. They knew I was banned from China, that I couldn't cross the border. They knew perfectly well what I was, but they came after me and hired me.
For four and half a year, I could write whatever I liked. I wrote leaders, op-ed pieces, I could say whatever I liked.
And it was a bit jockey inside the paper: "Oh God, what are you going to say about this Jonathan?" It, was perfectly OK.
Then came the editor's invitation for an interview with Jiang Zemin, for which he had already paid quite a tot. We invited the board of the People's Daily, at great expenses to Rupert Murdoch, to come to Britain first class.
They were flown around inside Britain and, as a reward for that, the editor of the Times was going to have an exclusive interview with Jiang just before the handover.
