Nobody likes journalists!
On Huw Edwards; gossip; evil; dorks.
When I started working as a journalist I used to get pissed off all the time about the bad reputation journalism, and journalists as people, had. I was proud of my job, was my logic at the time. I wanted to do this when I was a kid, now I did it, and it was cool and fun and interesting. Why did everyone hate journalists! Why did journalists enjoy the same professional reputation as estate agents, or Biblical tax collectors? It wasn’t fair! I still am proud of my job and enjoy it and think it is cool and fun and interesting. But when I first thought this stuff, I knew about five journalists, and none of them were older than about 25. Of course I thought it was unfair that journalism had a bad reputation. We were pre-frontal cortex development young! We all liked each other! None of us were actually a bit evil yet!
But then you move on in your career and your life and you discover it is, can be, maybe a little evil. Even if you don’t work in the actual evil bits (Westminster, fashion week), journalism can still make you a bit snippy, a bit mean. The fact it is essentially a dying industry — you’re either in a pivot to new technology era or a bankruptcy era, or sometimes, if you’re extremely unlucky, both — with dwindling resources means that the pay is bad and so people will gravitate towards it if they don’t have to care about the pay being bad, which essentially means it’s full of a lot of the same type of person. And the budgets are tight, so unless you have a staff salary — and sometimes if you do! — it can feel like you have to get chummy with the right sort of people and the right editors and it means it’s difficult to tell who’s mates with who because they like them or who just wants to be associated with who.
The fact it’s a deeply individualistic industry means it’s one which relies heavily on individuals monetising their own personalities. If you’re not careful you can find yourself turning all of your actual life experiences into pitches, especially if you’re a columnist, and bafflingly everyone wants to be a columnist. Other people kind of expect this, even, that your life is content, Nora Ephron style, the bad parts and the good. When I was sick the oncologist who diagnosed me followed up his bad news with “you’re a journalist, perhaps you can write about it”. When I tell people I’m getting divorced they immediately ask me if I am writing about it, or they just flat out tell me to do so, unprompted. And I say with lots of contempt and certainty: no, that would be insane, I hate the trauma writing pipeline. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t also quietly think to myself, Bilbo Baggins style, well why not, why shouldn’t I!
Journalism is an industry that tends to make people weird and territorial and solipsistic about their ideas and experiences and style, or perhaps attracts people who are these things already. (“It would be strange if the vain weren’t attracted to a job that pays you to express your opinions”, Rob Burley wrote. He was talking about politicians, but he might as well have been talking about journalists.) Recently I had a blazing row with another journalist who had behaved cruelly and yet when confronted with this attributed most of the bad things said about him — and there were a lot — to nothing more than professional jealousy. “Everyone just talks shit about me because I’m such a good writer”, he said, not for effect. “They only hate me because they’re jealous of me!” As with politics, journalism obviously leads to brain worms for the right sort of person.
On the other hand, if being exposed to grit and grub on a daily basis doesn’t make you either cynical and misanthropic or grandiosely narcissistic, it can transform your worldview into a kind of hand-wringing virtue signalling that often doesn’t read as much more than simply a slightly different type of cynicism. It’s sometimes hard to tell if a writer tweets or talks about a subject because they actually care about it, or because they care about it and subsequently expect they will get paid to write about it.
I’ve been thinking about journalism’s reputation this week because of the Huw Edwards story and the wave of journalistic introspection and backlash it’s generated. Camilla Long wrote in this week’s Sunday Times that it had been a “trying” few days for “ordinary jobbing hacks”. (“No journalism please: we’re British” was the headline). Mick Lynch told PoliticsJoe “the press in this country is a disgrace”. Huw Lemmey wrote about how a conversation about journalistic ethics and privacy overlooks the societal homophobia embedded within the story. On Twitter there was a cacophony of completely mad views ranging from: The Sun did absolutely nothing wrong, or: that they did nothing morally wrong, even if there were some technicalities about privacy law, sure, or: as GB News said, the whole thing was the fault of woke culture and negronis (???), or: that every member of staff at The Sun should either be sacked or resign in protest, because surely this meant within the week the paper would sink into the ground forever — and why did it even still exist anyway — staffed only by the ghost of Sam Fox and the vague memory of the Falklands War.
The Observer called the Huw Edwards story both a “grim guessing game” and “the saga that gripped Britain”, which perhaps sums it up best. Of course, a story with gossip at the centre would captivate this country. And would captivate this industry. And of course journalism makes you gossip more, because it’s an industry built on gossip, whether you’re media celebrities or nobodies with newsletters. Normally the gossip is demonstrably one of the best perks of journalism; the thrill of getting to post a celebrity’s name down a WhatsApp group hours before it’s confirmed by Sky News, the glee of knowing the Queen was dead by lunch even if they didn’t announce it until 6pm.
Last week I went for a drink with two friends who are journalists (but more importantly who are my mates) back to back on consecutive nights. On night one we ordered our drinks while Huw Edwards’s wife released a statement on Twitter, and then quickly moved on from this and instead talked about other journalists we knew, and whether they were nicer or better or less funny and less interesting than us. I had just had a particularly busy few weeks — it’s summer! — of those kind of industry thingies that always start in the afternoon for some reason, which my friend avoids because the people who go to these parties tire them out. Including me. “I like them”, I shrugged. “I like the gossip.” This is true. I fucking love gossip. The next day, having been to another party in which I discovered I was the subject of some mildly nasty gossip — comes for us all! — I had another, more morose drink, with another journalist, in which I stared tearfully into my Aperol spritz feeling sorry for myself and regretting my own social hubris. Journalistic gossip is only fun when it’s about someone you don’t know, or someone you know and don’t like, not someone you know and like, certainly not yourself. “I hate media”, says my friend after tell him the story. My friend loves his job and is good at it, so he’s saying this maybe partially because it’s true but also, I think, to make me feel a bit better. “Feels like the only decent people in it are me and my mates. And then I start thinking ‘wait maybe we are also scum’.” I tell my friend I don’t think he’s scum, and reply to WhatsApps from another friend who is making fun of someone we both know on Twitter (in a jovial way).
I think about it a lot after though. It’s not necessarily that there’s anything inherently wrong with gossip. I’ve written before on how writing and gossip overlap, and I love this essay on the function of gossip in society and how it can be a healthy alternative to tedious public moralism. But more than the gossip, I think about how information moves in an industry that’s somewhat unique in that it’s small and concentrated and in which everyone knows or kind of knows each other. I think about how journalism is perceived differently in the US and the UK. Americans seem to see journalism as a sort of vocation, while British journalists take it all a bit less seriously. I think about how this is reflected in British and American depictions of journalism on screen; Michael Keaton’s tireless crusade in Spotlight to Phil Jupitus being forced to quit his job and become a bin man in Mike Bassett: England Manager; Carey Mulligan’s quest for justice in She Said to the guy that dresses up in a pork chop costume to follow the Prime Minister around in The Thick Of It (in the words of Terri Coverley: “The problem is that if you say to a journalist, ‘Can you avoid that topic?’ that’s when they really go for it. It’s like saying to the school bully, ‘I’ll wet myself if you tickle me’”).
I think about how big grim, grubby, horrible stories like what happened last week with Huw Edwards make people think media is grotty because it kind of is grotty on some level. I think about how it’s probably not a good idea for the kinds of people who at school painted Warhammer figurines or had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Coen Brothers films to all now exist in the same space together, professionally outnerding each other and talking about each other too much as adults. And then other times I think I am being harsh and misanthropic, because I love my job and it is fun and it’s how I met many people I now love and it means I got to watch Barbie for free before it came out in the cinema. And, having watched it, I really would not have wanted to pay to see Barbie in the cinema. So I am very grateful for that.
This week I read
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy