By Tony Harcup
Journalists are heroes to some and scumbags to others but the truth is that most are somewhere in the middle, trying to do as good a job as they can, often in difficult circumstances. That, at least, is the view of Tony Harcup, author of A Dictionary of Journalism. We asked him to tell us about some of the good – and not so good – things that journalists do. Do you agree with the below?
The nine best things about journalists:
- We tell you things that you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
- Our default position is healthy scepticism.
- We know that there’s no such thing as a stupid question.
- Our way with words translates jargon into language that actual people use.
- We juggle complex intellectual, legal, commercial and ethical issues every day, simultaneously and at high speed, all while giving the impression of being little deeper than a puddle.
- Our lateral thinking spots the significance of the dog that didn’t bark (noting in the process that Sherlock Holmes was created by a journalist).
- We speak truth to power (or, at least, we say boo to a goose).
- Our gallows humour keeps us going despite the grim stories we cover and the even grimmer people we work with (perhaps the most literal exponent of the art was journalist Ben Hecht who wrote the movies His Girl Friday and The Front Page about hacks covering a hanging).
- We identify with other journalists as fellow members of society’s awkward squad (which is why even those of us who have left the frontline of reporting and become “hackademics” still can’t stop saying “we”).
The nine worst things about journalists:
- We have a tendency to tell young hopefuls that all the quality has vanished from journalism compared to when we started out (journalists have been harking back to a mythical golden age for well over a century).
- Our scepticism can sometimes become cynicism.
- We routinely demand public apologies or resignations from anyone accused of misbehaviour (except ourselves).
- Our way with words is too often used to reduce individuals or communities to stereotypes.
- We have been known to conflate a popular touch with boorish anti-intellectualism.
- Our collective memory lets us down surprisingly often. (We won’t get fooled again? Don’t bet on it.)
- We are in danger of viewing the world through the eyes of whoever employs us, forgetting that, while they might hire us, they don’t own us.
- Our insistence that we are something of a special breed is a bit rich given that most journalistic jobs have more in common with The Office than with All The President’s Men.
- We eviscerate politicians for fiddling their expenses while celebrating hacks from the golden age (see no. 1) for doing exactly the same.
Tony Harcup is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield. A Dictionary of Journalism, first edition, will be published 15 May 2014. It covers over 1,400 wide-ranging entries on the terms that are likely to be encountered by students of the subject, and aims to offer a broad, accessible point of reference on an ever-topical and constantly-changing field that affects everyone’s knowledge and perception of the world.
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By Matthew Flinders
From Canada to Australia — and all points in between — something has gone wrong. A gap has emerged between the governors and the governed. A large dose of scepticism about the promises and motives of politicians is an important and healthy part of any democracy, but it would appear that healthy pessimism has mutated into a more pathological form of corrosive cynicism.
P.J. O’Rourke’s Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010) and Peter Oborne’s The Rise of Political Lying (2005) are very different books. The former focuses on American politics and adopts a gutter-speak tone and style, while the latter examines British politics in order to make the argument that all politicians are generally self-interested, corrupt and mendacious. Both books therefore offer a rather shallow polemic; a thin and woefully immature version of the ‘bad faith model of politics’. This view of politics resonates with public attitudes and is reflected in a great body of research and data on falling levels of public trust in politics, politicians, and political institutions. O’Rourke and Oborne are not alone in being ‘disaffected democrats’.
To those who are willing to promote or believe the ‘bad faith model of politics’ let me dare to suggest that you are wrong! Let me dare to suggest that democratic politics delivers far more than most people realise and that no politics can ever satisfy a world of ever-increasing public demands and expectations. Let me go further and suggest that most politicians, particularly in those more economically developed parts of the world where trust in politicians is so low, are actually fairly normal people like you and me. There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’; just like there are no simple solutions to complex social problems. Across the world millions of people reap the benefits of fundamentally honest political systems and it is possible that those who remember the pain, death, and devastation of the two world wars that shaped the twentieth century might have a slightly more personal understanding of why democratic politics matters and what it delivers.
As Bernard Crick famously argued exactly fifty years ago in his In Defence of Politics democratic politics revolves around conciliation, compromise, and squeezing collective decisions out of a vast range of conflicting demands. It is therefore inevitably messy, often slow, and nearly always cumbersome; but it is also a civilising and quite beautiful activity for the simple reason that it allows people to live together without resorting to violence. In the current context of political disengagement and distrust, Crick’s argument is more important and valid today than when it was first made half a century ago. Let me push this argument just a little further, for those who really want to understand why politics matters and what it delivers they might read Tim Butcher’s book Blood River and the raw violence, corruption and fear that he sees as he journey across Africa. Politics therefore matters because it allows fear societies to become free societies. It is for exactly this reason that people across North Africa and the Middle East are currently dying in the name of securing open democratic politics.
Let me be very clear about my argument. I am not saying that democratic politics is perfect or that all politicians are angels, but I am arguing that politics delivers far more than most people appear to realise. A braver man than me might even suggest that the younger generations have become ‘democratically decadent’ in the sense that many of them appear to take so much for granted, while at the sa
