Thanks to the Murdoch papers, clever-dick journalism doesn't look so clever any more.
I have spent about 30 years worshipping Fleet St. Now I just feel like a dick. It's really quite disheartening watching your heroes being so embarrassing. Disillusioning, in the manner of a crazed Led Zep fanatic who has discovered Justin Bieber has joined the band.
To tell the truth, I'm starting to doubt my whole devout passion for that certain kind of clever-dick English journalism. Sure, I signed up for the righteous rhetoric about the role of the Fourth Estate and being fearless and holding elected officials to account. But to be honest, I just wanted to be Julie Burchill.
I wanted to go to the Groucho Club and be paid to be obnoxious and opinionated: making money from "the writing equivalent of screaming and throwing things". Toby Young, part of the same cool kids set, said "I don't have any idea about anything" and turned that into a career. It all seemed deeply glamorous to be so brattish. It doesn't seem that cool now.
But the media has changed. When I went to journalism school in Auckland the job was viewed as a bit of a banal trade, like being a carpetlayer. The most important thing was to keep a pair of gumboots in your car and know how to read a council agenda. Being witty was not required and actively frowned upon. Brainy people in New Zealand were not hacks. They were Rhodes Scholars and became doctors or bureaucrats or lawyers where they could earn lots of money and be really pompous.
It was different in Britain. There the brightest graduates put their gigantic intellects to good use being smart-arses sneering at other people and popping their egos - a jammy gig. "Journalism could be described as turning one's enemies into money," said Private Eye's Craig Brown.
Maybe it was the legacy of Churchill - he could deliver a one-liner - that saw journalism become a higher-status career for bright young things from Oxbridge than, say, politics. "Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law," the late Auberon Waugh said.
As a newly graduated Boris Johnson said after lasting a week at a management consultancy "Try as I might I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious." So he started writing instead. Bojo recently described his £250k stipend for his Telegraph column as "chicken feed".
It has become hard to tell whose egos are the biggest. The media must be free to criticise and humiliate the powerful. But what if the media have become more powerful than the people they write about? Like most things it comes down to money. It is not surprising that journalists in Britain became so arrogant and thought they were above the people they were reporting on. With their "chicken feed" salaries, they were. And yes I know, so far the disgraced media outlets in the phone-hacking scandal are just dirty old downmarket Rupert Murdoch tabloids.
Yet from where I'm sitting it's a bit hard to separate the drawling arrogance of the media toffs where anything is acceptable as long as you are not a "terrible old bore" - from the arrogance that led to phone-hacking.
Maybe the New Zealand media, a humble jobbing bunch with boring old gumboots and council agendas rather than Groucho Club cocaine, are not so bad after all.
dhc@deborahhillcone.com
