I think serious news, like John Campbell's show, aims for honesty. Oh, I'm sure news shows like Seven Sharp do too, although sometimes Mike Hosking comes across as a rich person telling middle-class people to blame poor people, rather than someone who can relate to having a bucket of shit fall on his head.
The unarguable point is that the news business is changing, and the new emperors have learned a lesson from the old emperors - the main one being, empires fall. Part of this change has seen an exodus of senior journalists from journalism to work in public relations. But even they would probably agree with me that sincerity-infused journalists like John Campbell and his team underwrite our morality as a society.
But despite changing technology, journalism is not the same as banal fluff. The job journalists do is to bear witness to suffering, and try to find some meaning in it. This is not an easy job; it is also something you can't do unless you are respectful. It involves being brave enough to recognise it is a fuzzy, smeared, paradoxical world. It means knowing we need to have hard conversations, not just ones that come in two flavours: agreement or war.
A quote I found somewhere and wrote in my diary without attribution - good journalist, me - says journalists and writers are like shaman, repositories of wisdom, but also danger. "We have power and influence but often of a weird and elusive kind and we can also be vulnerable." At his best John Campbell could be dangerous.
The way I see it, we can only find ourselves in relationship with others. Some feelings of loss and longing are too disturbing to bear on our own; we need others. All the things that keep you morally good are painful things - guilt, remorse, empathy.
No wonder we sometimes found it too confronting to turn on Campbell Live. At least I did. The terrifying thing is we all know the world is something over which we have virtually no control. But courage is as contagious as fear. Journalism at its best gives people the feeling they could catch some courage, rather than some fear.
Tom Stoppard said "revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering". Don't you think John Campbell's crusading journalism sometimes succeeded in doing that? I do. Not just a biscuit.
Believe in your selfie if you dare to be uncool
I said sorry to a woman who backed into and damaged my parked car. She said: "Why are YOU saying sorry?" It made me realise I must stop apologising for everything.
This week I also said sorry for posting yet another Facebook selfie, because apparently selfies are over. The Guardian said when Prince Harry calls time on a craze, you know it's well and truly dead.
I've taken a lot of selfies and you know what? They cheered me up. After a sad divorce and feeling pretty rubbish, taking pictures of "My new life" - that presented myself as looking not a reject - was uplifting. Admittedly I was coming off a low base, but it made me feel I could be a different person and not defined by how I was in the past, and it was gratifying that other people liked them. It may seem narcissistic but it is not as if I suddenly thought "Wow, I'm so fantastic and wonderful" but just that it made me feel the opposite of shunned for a bit. The Guardian said: "The selfie was the great silliness of our time, the trainspotting of the techno age. So take them if you dare - the world is laughing at you." But go right ahead and laugh, I don't care. I've stopped apologising when I don't need to.
