"Manchester, Manchester...so much to answer for"

Ouch!

"There is no such city as Manchester", and we have all lost by it.

Poor old Harvie!
Manchester is what it has always been, a soap opera of Where-There's-Muck-There's Brass with a theme song of Dirty Old Town. Eventually the brass sounds loudly enough and its natives head off to London, typically for which see The Guardian's departure.

This why provincial Britain holds Manchester in contempt. Any character it might once have had has long since faded into a pathetic copy of London's failed myopic "culture."

Modern Manchester is nothing but a phony product of self-deluded press releases, a Max Clifford inspired Wilsonville of third rate pop music and tenth rate architecture.

A less than sympathetic response to the Scottish historian and SNP MSP, Colin Harvie’s piece on Open Democracy.

The "Manchester" Harvie speaks of, however, is the metaphorical one, the one of swaggering regional dissent and protest delivering the two fingers to London and in particular its media elite. Metaphorical and in present times, most probably mythical.

Harvie, like the late Patrick Hannan, sees some kind of media conspiracy centred on the nation’s capital, a conspiracy which takes delight in the suppression of voices from the provinces (including, coincidently, his own- banished as he is now from Comment is Free); expand the theory and, of course, you have the reason why Alex Salmond has been excluded from the UK party leaders’ nationwide debates.

This conspiracy does exist and Harvie hints at its true nature, but as with Hannan before him, he’s reluctant to expand on and carry that hint to its logical conclusion:

The material interests that lie behind this are obvious. Metromedia has structured its own rewards round the payoffs and bonuses of the City and the hi-tech world: the director-general of the BBC pulls in a salary four times that of the prime minister, the editor of the Guardian is on nearly half-a-million pounds

OK, the BBC is an exception and a law very much onto itself, but leave it to the one side and that first sentence indirectly explains the prime motivation behind everything the "London" and every other media in the world does; in other words, the conspiracy in question very much exists and is rejoicing in the name of the "free-market".

Why was Harvie given his cards from CIF?
His pieces were "quite low-key and uncontroversial".

Why were Salmond and the various regional parties’ leaders not invited to the TV UK-wide debates?
For a large majority of the potential viewing (and advertisement watching) public their views are irrelevant and thus boring: screen additional regional-specific debates in N.Ireland, Scotland and Wales and you (possibly) may have a viable market.

Why are regional newspapers, TV channels struggling for an audience?
In the modern technological world, where I can access almost any journalist’s opinion almost anywhere in the world, the "Three donkeys run amok in Ballymacash Main Street" alternative on offering from UTV and its ilk no longer appeal especially when my own spare time, due to the inconvenient fact that I also need to earn a crust in the free market, is finite.

"An economy dependent on cultural capital is morally vulnerable since, if the arts are breadwinners, they cannot be allowed to be critical; profit takes precedence."

Quite. But if that fact disturbs you, then the tools now exist to set up your own micro-media and if you’re interesting, provocative or barmy enough folk will read you. What you can’t do anymore (and actually, probably never could) is force the modern media, in a highly competitive market, to carry views, opinions and arguments which they reckon carry no interest for their potential viewers, listeners or readers.