Homage to Lyra McKee — the journalist I miss most

In the two generations since Watergate, the image of the journalist has gone from that of plucky truth-seeker to sensationalist and partisan hack. Somewhere along the way the fresh-faced idealists of All the President’s Men gave way to the dissociative anti-hero of Nightcrawler.

Corporate-driven news values? Probably. Phone hacking? Definitely. But what grates more is the suspicion that journalism is
a clique that protects its own, disdains its audience and passes off its attitudes and preferences as the neutral norm. The perception isn’t entirely wide of the mark.

Lyra McKee was a one-woman union for the reputation of journalism. To her it was more than blue-tick-on-blue-tick gossip-shopping and SEO-chasing junk news. Journalism had a social purpose and, in that, a dignity. There was no pretended objectivity with Lyra. She was for the poor, the minorities, the refugees, the sex workers, the abused and all those left behind in a country struggling to catch up with a promised but elusive future.