A pressing issue

We live in crazy times. The world is crumbling around us. We’ve entered a third sudden U-turn lockdown and schools have been closed again at the eleventh hour, causing chaos. Over The Pond, civil unrest is rife as Trump-supporting nutters invade the hallowed halls of Capitol Hill, leaving devastation in their wake. It’s like watching a disaster film, but it’s real.

Thank god for the people who are holding it together. The ones who are keeping our troubled country ticking over in the most unbelievable of circumstances. The key workers. The heroes of the hour. The ones we clap for on our doorsteps. The ones who do the jobs the rest of us are thankful we don’t have to. And we appreciate them all. Well, nearly all. We obviously don’t appreciate the journalists. Because they’re all lying scum, right?

Journalists you say? Key workers you say?! What kind of trickery is this? Well, hold the front page (pun intended), sit down and get a hot, sweet tea, because since the beginning of the first lockdown, news journalists have been classed as keyworkers, as they provide a vital national service.

But how can this be? The news journalists? The Mainstream Media? But isn’t The Media the enemy of the people? Isn’t it The Media that manipulates the truth, tells fake news and deliberately fans the flames of hatred?

Firstly, no. And secondly, no. ‘The Media’ or ‘MSM’ as the online haters like to call it, is not one huge, conspiratorial conglomerate out to deliberately misinform you. Contrary to popular belief, it’s actually made up of thousands of individuals. Real people. People who eat, sleep, breathe and shit just like you. People with mortgages, families, principles. People who have absolutely no intention of misleading you, because, believe it or not, they’re too busy getting on with their job. The news we watch, listen to or read doesn’t just magically appear. It isn’t made by elves overnight like a tiny pair of perfectly hand-sewn shoes. It’s meticulously compiled and brought to you every hour on the hour, every day, by every single one of those thousands of people, each one playing their vital part in the process.

Sadly, the journalists of today don’t garner the same respect from the public that they once did. Gone are the days when whole families would gather round the wireless of an evening, eating powdered egg and spam fritters, drawing lines of gravy browning down the back of each other’s legs and listening with bated breath to the cut-glass enunciation and gravitas-filled tones of a dickie-bow-clad announcer giving them the news of the day, which they trusted implicitly, without question.

Unfortunately, in today’s cynical age, it’s fashionable to not only be mistrusting of broadcast media or the written press, but to actually accuse it, and therefore the people who work in it, of being duplicitous, devious and rotten to the core.

I first experienced people’s dislike for journalists more than 20 years ago, when, as a newly qualified journo, I stood in a queue outside St James’s Palace, waiting to sign the book of condolence after the death of Princess Diana. Or rather, after she was ‘killed by The Media’. As crowds waited for hours on end, there was a sense of desperate sadness, but also a feeling that we were in this together, communally mourning the loss. In the Blitz spirit, conversations opened, pleasantries were exchanged and people began to open up about themselves. The atmosphere palpably changed when, in response to someone’s question, I mentioned that I was a journalist. Suddenly the conversations stopped, backs started turning. I was persona non grata, as if I’d straddled a Kawasaki and followed Diana into the tunnel myself. This was clearly the way it was going to be from here on in.

In the 2020 National Journalism Week last October, Her Majesty The Queen said ‘The Covid-19 pandemic has once again demonstrated what an important public service the established news media provides, both nationally and regionally. As our world has changed dramatically, having trusted, reliable sources of information, particularly at a time when there are so many sources competing for our attention, is vital.’

As a former news journalist, I agree with Her Maj that now, as always, journalism matters. My profession is reviled more than any other, largely by people who have no understanding of it and who have their own agenda to push, but who happily and hypocritically use that same media every day as a source of information. It’s soul-destroying to see your profession constantly undermined, when it’s actually part of the backbone of our society and has been for centuries.

I get it though. You’re groovy. You’re down with the kids. You’re 52 but you still go to Glastonbury. You own at least one pair of Converse, you have bottles of poster paint in your house that are exclusively used for making anti-establishment banners for whichever social campaign is currently fashionable, and you make a point of letting everyone on social media know that you still listen to The Stone Roses in your down-time by posting a barefoot picture of you reclining in a sunny park somewhere in West London. Right on.

You hate The Press because it stands for everything you despise. Although you’re not quite sure what those things are. You particularly hate The Sun and The Daily Mail, often while sitting in a tent, making sure everyone can hear you laughing about how many drugs you took while you were at university. You hate The Daily Mail so much that you ‘stick it to the man’ by hilariously and uniquely giving it the same side-splitting moniker as everyone else who hates it. The Daily Fail. Ouch. That’ll sting.

There are social media hashtags of #scummedia and calls to boycott buying The Sun in order to shut it down. To close an entire newspaper just to prove a point. To put every junior reporter, senior correspondent, section editor, sub-editor, production editor, PA, editorial assistant, cleaner, caterer, driver, supplier, IT or HR person out of a job, on the breadline, struggling to pay their mortgages and feed their families, just so you can make a woke protest about how badly you think someone else was treated. The irony of that will be lost on many.

Yes, there are salacious headlines. They’re written that way to get a reaction. And it worked. You reacted. Yes, there are bad apples, like in any other profession, but they’re few and far between. To put all your journalistic Granny Smiths in the same basket and assume that every one of them is rotten is laughable. You may as well say all doctors are bad because Harold Shipman was a wrong’un. To suggest that all journalists (ie The Media) lie and deliberately MISinform is tantamount to saying that all doctors choose to take lives rather than save them. It’s literally the opposite of what they do. In both cases. The opposite of everything they trained for, of their entire professional experience, and the antithesis of why they got into the profession in the first place. I’ve worked in many newsrooms in my time and have never once in more than 20 years, known a colleague whose first thought when they woke up in the morning was to mislead the public. Quite the reverse. They became journalists to tell the truth. To ask questions and to get answers. To uncover the facts and to impart those facts to the public. And that’s what they do.

Many professions are having a hard time at the moment and we fear for their mental health. But no one ever worries about the mental health of the journalists. They’re instrinsically heartless, right? Empty, self-serving husks. Nothing affects them. Not the pressure of the job, not the contempt from the public, not being labelled as ‘scum’, not the work they’ve done on child abuse or animal cruelty, not reporting on atrocities in war zones, not the horror of terror attacks, not the details of these and other scenes that are too horrific to print. Journalists are immune to all of this, right? They’re not real people. They’re just ‘The Media’.

In 25 years of newsrooms and editorial offices, I’ve never seen that. What I have seen is real, genuine people. People with their own concerns, their own frailties, their own worries. People who are doing an often badly paid job under extreme pressure. People who work to strict deadlines hour by hour, long into the night, who sacrifice home life to uncover the truth for an ungrateful public. Who are seeing their industry crumble around them, who constantly feel the threat of redundancy looming as publications fold every day.

But they’re still scum, right? Well, if you hate The Media so much, if you despise The Press, if you think you can do it better, have a go. Be my guest. Do the training, take the law exams, cut your teeth on the local rag, make the contacts, do the research, hone your craft, meet the deadlines, find the stories, uncover the truth, build up years of experience, do the unsociable hours, lose the sleep, take the shit pay, have the integrity, be bold, hold people to account, bust a gut to do the best job you possibly can every single day, then hear the very people you’ve been doing it for refer to you as ‘scum’.

If you really can’t get that particular anti-media bee out of your bonnet, and I know there are many of you who can’t, then by all means carry on despising the rich businessmen who own the newspapers, hold on to that misplaced view that The Press whips up public dissent, or carry on despising the apparently blatant yet indefinable BBC bias, whichever side you claim it to be on. But remember that every time you do this, every time you lazily blame The Press for what’s wrong in society, every time you refer to The Media as scum or casually use the term ‘fake news’ to boost your flimsy street cred, you are doing a huge disservice to the decent men and women of that industry who in reality are the antithesis of what you think they are and what you want them to be.

And ask yourself this. How do we even know about the pandemic, the lockdown or the vaccines, or what’s going on in Washington? From a strip of paper surreptitiously strapped to the leg of a carrier pigeon? From the tea leaves read by an aged aunt in a paisley head scarf? Or from an Angel Gabriel-like vision that miraculously came to us in the night? No, the journalists told us. The experts. The people who are trained to seek out the truth, to be impartial and to impart that news to us. The news you watch, read or listen to every day, while undermining the very people who brought it to you.

The Press is the friend, not the enemy of the people, and the sooner some of those people start realising that and put their half-baked, Converse-clad personal agendas aside, the better off we’ll all be.