Journalism

Thursday

Francis Elliott

The dangers of televising lobby briefings

Like a tongue searching for an absent tooth, I keep wondering if I’m missing anything from my two decades as a lobby hack. Friends, of course, and perhaps the vast, grey field of sloping slate as seen from the Times’s parliamentary office. That empty and silent space, the roof of Westminster Hall, seemed austere and indifferent, a mental refuge from the babble beneath and within. The opposite aspect, towards the crumbling guts of the Palace of Westminster, elicits more complicated memories. I arrived in the press gallery aged 30 to take a job as Westminster correspondent for a clutch of provincial papers. On my first day my new colleagues took

Thursday

Sarah Ditum

Joan Didion’s needle-sharp eye never fails

Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and the other is that they are, perversely, far too coherent. The pieces are pulled from their original contexts — newspapers, magazines — and thrown together with others they have no relation to beyond a common author. But (the too-coherent problem) most authors only have one or maybe two ideas to work through, so you end up doing the intellectual equivalent of walking a dozen rounds of the garden when you had hoped to be hiking off into a grand new landscape. I don’t know what Joan Didion’s one or maybe

Tuesday

Steerpike

Watch: Boris on the problem with journalists

What’s the phrase? Poacher turned gamekeeper? Boris Johnson was once the arch poacher — a journalist at the Telegraph before taking on the editorship of Mr S’s own illustrious publication. Now it seems Mr Johnson has discovered what it feels like to be at the other end of public scrutiny.  On a press trip to a south London school, the PM mourned the fact journalists are ‘always abusing or attacking people’. Instead, he explained to a slightly bemused school child, that ‘a lightbulb went off in [his] mind’ and that instead, he decided to give politics a go. Nothing to do with childhood dreams of being ‘world king’ eh?  Still, Mr S picked up

Thursday

John R. MacArthur

The decline of American journalism

The latest absurdity in American journalism is the forced resignation of the veteran New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr for uttering the word ‘nigger’ in front of a group of teenage tourists on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru. It has been justly ridiculed by many sane conservatives and even some courageous liberals. Although the infraction happened more than a year ago, calls for reason have had no practical effect against the demands online and inside the Times that McNeil be fired after the Daily Beast revealed the teenagers’ complaints. McNeil’s own defence is that he used the racial epithet as information with the high school students, not as an

Thursday

Rod Liddle

A conciliatory P.J. O’Rourke is not the satirist we know and love

There was an acidic bravura and beauty in P.J. O’Rourke’s early journalism and a gleefulness in the ease with which it raised ire. Hitherto, satirists — and especially American ones — had tended to come from the left, none more so than O’Rourke’s mentor Hunter S. Thompson, who campaigned long and hard for George McGovern in 1972. Not Patrick Jake. He sprung like a jubilant, potty-mouthed leprechaun from a country which had fallen back in love with itself after the self-flagellating miseries of Vietnam, Watergate and Tehran. Under Ronald Reagan, the economy flourished, the Cold War was won and while the left still carped and cavilled, aghast at the demise

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Lockdown might bring the Dickensian Christmas back into fashion

I feel like a prisoner, making daily marks on the cell wall to chart the approach of freedom. But will it be freedom, or will we be on parole, obliged to wear a tag and subject to re-incarceration at authority’s whim? Such thoughts do not encourage equanimity. On that subject, I remember a delightfully splenetic political column by the late — alas — Alan Watkins, published a generation ago. As Christmas approaches, even the most acerbic hack feels obliged to relent and sound a little more like Fezziwig, a little less like Scrooge. Perhaps because he was never given to excessive astringency, Alan did not relent. He was complaining about

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood

When talkies appeared in 1927, Hollywood went searching for talkers to write them. It turned to men like Herman J. Mankiewicz: to journalists. The greatest screenwriters of the golden age were journalists first; unlike novelists, they thrived in Hollywood — at least professionally. Good films and good journalism need brevity; novels don’t. Reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald struggling at MGM, 12 years after The Great Gatsby, is brutal, like trying to watch a man learn to walk. The film Mank, by David Fincher, tells the story of how Mankiewicz and Orson Welles created Citizen Kane — for which they shared an Oscar for the screenplay in 1942 — and how

Thursday

William Cook

Never a dull sentence: the journalism of Harry Perry Robinson

Is Boris Johnson a fan of Harry Perry Robinson? If he isn’t, he really ought to be. Reading this absorbing biography, I was struck by how much they have in common — especially in their early lives. Both men went to public school, then on to Oxford, then into journalism, where they proved incapable of writing a dull sentence. They both divorced and remarried — and were also American citizens, for a while. Both dipped a toe into politics, but while Boris took the plunge, Harry stepped back and remained a jobbing hack until his dying day, the finest journalist of his generation. The biggest difference, however, is that Harry

Friday

James Kirkup

The BBC’s failure to report gender identity accurately

‘Blackpool woman accessed child abuse images in hospital bed’. It’s a good headline, in that it catches your attention. But there are two things making it an effective headline, at least in the sense that it gets attention. One is the notion of someone looking at child porn in a hospital – that’s a shocking thing, and as they sometimes say in American journalism schools, ‘news is a surprise.’ The other important part of the headline is the word ‘woman’. We don’t often associate women with crimes like viewing images of child abuse; the idea of a woman doing so has a bit of ‘man bites dog’ news surprise to

Thursday

Taki

Writing my High Life column made a man of me

As Cole Porter might have said, only second-rate people go on and on about their inner lives. Self-analysis, according to Cole, is the twin of self-promotion. Yet in this 10,000th issue of the world’s oldest and best weekly, and in my 43rd year of writing High Life, I have to admit to a bit of both of the above. So before any of you retreat into laptops and mobiles, some nostalgia is called for, starting in the spring of 1977. Many of the writers back then sent in their longhand-written copy via messenger, paid for by The Spectator. I used to type mine and slip it under the door at

Douglas Murray

I love my fellow hacks – even when I disagree with them

It’s one way to keep in touch with people. Each morning, somewhere between the first coffee of the day and the first drink, I open my computer, log on to social media and see which of my friends or colleagues is ‘trending’ today. ‘Ooh,’ I think as I see their names flash up, ‘I wonder what Julie/Charles/Allison/James/Rod (usually Rod) has done now’. Then I click and read all about their crimes, usually through a filter of people labouring under the impression that a writer’s job is to say what everyone else has already agreed on. The howls, incidentally, mostly emanating from people who in no sense subscribe to the organ

Tuesday

Alex Massie

A note to fellow lockdown lethargics

Strange times, these. Dull and unsettling in equal measure. Much of life feels as though it is stuck in some interminable holding pattern, waiting for permission to land and move on. The days drag, even for those of us accustomed to working from home. But the city is a dreary place, for now, stripped of most of its conveniences and opportunities.  Worse still, there are professional problems. This is a game in which you’re always supposed to have a view and the hotter it is the better. Incentives favour certainty; if in doubt double down on your lack of doubt. Bets should not be hedged; everything is a triumph or

Thursday

Brigid Keenan

How Nova revolutionised women’s magazines

Batsford has just brought out a huge tome on Nova — ‘one of the most influential magazines in history’ — compiled by two of the magazine’s star art directors, David Hillman and Harri Peccinotti. It covers the ten years that the magazine existed, 1965 to 1975, and focuses on the brilliant and groundbreaking layouts it introduced. But somehow it is not quite the Nova that I loved when I went to work there as assistant editor in 1967. For me, Nova was its editor, Dennis Hackett, who had been brought in to save the failing magazine soon after its launch. I don’t know what genius first thought of putting a

Thursday

Trevor Kavanagh

Penned in

Cynical old hacks like me have been amused by the chorus of establishment applause for the Mail on Sunday’s great Kim Darroch scoop. Our elected masters were outraged, rightly, by threats from the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu to criminalise editors who publish leaked memos. Politicians left, right and centre condemned an assault on press freedom. Alan Rusbridger, saintly ex-editor of the Guardian, demanded to know what they taught budding bobbies in police college these days. ‘I would like to suggest a new and compulsory course,’ he said. ‘Let’s call it “The Basics Of Free Speech”. Lesson number one. The police do not tell newspaper editors what to write.’ Others

Thursday

Roger Alton

A very aggressive tackle

Forty years ago the football transfer market went crazy: the British record was broken four times in 1979, more than in any other year before or since. A lot of this was down to Malcolm Allison at Manchester City, who shelled out a record amount for a teenager (£250,000 for Steve MacKenzie, an apprentice at Palace) and £1.45 million to bring Steve Daley from Wolves. That was later, unkindly but not inaccurately, described as ‘the biggest waste of money in football history’. Allison continued to spend money like a drunk in a bar; something the club never recovered from until it became part of the sovereign wealth portfolio of one

Thursday

Stephen Phillips

Writing that burns the eyes

Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If any occur, there’s a reliable chance John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ will figure among them, and not just because it will have been assigned at an impressionable age in school. For the first time in its history, the New Yorker cleared an entire issue in August 1946 to run the 30,000-word piece in full. In Mr Straight Arrow, his chronicle of Hersey’s career, the former Times Literary Supplement editor Jeremy Treglown relates an account of its reception among the international press corps in Rome — every one rapt, occupying their own cone

Thursday

Ian Sansom

The bad cat of journalism

God, I wish I was Janet Malcolm. Fifty or more years as a staff writer on the New Yorker, reviews in the New York Review of Books, the occasional incendiary non-fiction bestseller (In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), even the famous lawsuit. (She was sued for libel by the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson.) If Janet Malcolm is the thinking woman’s Joan Didion, then Nobody’s Looking at You is her Slouching Towards Bethlehem: a lot less slouching. Nobody’s Looking at You collects just over a dozen of Malcolm’s articles from the past decade or so, ranging from some pretty stringent profile

Thursday

Brigid Keenan

There’s something about Mary

I think I probably qualify as the oldest fashion editor in the world, because in spite of my advanced age I am still writing about clothes (in the Oldie). This gives me one USP: it means that I was actually around — even wearing them myself — when the revolutionary fashion ideas that are now the stuff of museum exhibitions were being invented. Next month the Mary Quant exhibition opens at the V&A, and sure enough I have been asked to talk about those giddy times for a video that will be shown at the museum. I was 16 in the autumn of 1955 when Quant’s shop, Bazaar, first shocked

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Brideshead revisited

Nicholas Hytner’s new show, Alys, Always, is based on a Harriet Lane novel that carries a strong echo of Brideshead. A well-educated journalist, Frances, becomes entangled with the wealthy Kyte family (the closeness to ‘Flyte’ is doubtless intentional), and she befriends the silly daughter, Polly, before setting her sights on the enigmatic father, Laurence, a famous scribbler who never gives interviews. This slow-moving tale is intercut with scenes from Frances’s day job at a failing newspaper where the staff keep getting the boot. But Frances, mystifyingly, retains her post. How come? Floppiness is her most conspicuous quality. She’s a watchful sponge with no wit, charm or intellect, and for most

Thursday

David Cairns

‘They’re finally going to play my music’

According to his friend and fellow-composer Ernest Reyer, the last words Berlioz spoke on his deathbed were: ‘They are finally going to play my music’. It has taken time, but he was right. A century and a half later, Berlioz 150 is the watchword of the hour. That is as it should be. Berlioz was a devotee of the ancient world (‘I have spent my life with that race of demi-gods’), where it was believed that at the moment of death one might be granted foreknowledge of the future. Why has it taken so long? In his native France there were plenty of reasons. As a forceful, witty but sardonic