A Substack first: I rejoice at my falling ratings. It means I'm simply not bonkers enough for this new media age
Scoops don't matter any more in journalism. All that matters now are extreme views, be they left or right, or that point at which they now meet
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like at this moment to announce I will be retiring from this programme in two weeks time, because of poor ratings. Since this show was the only thing I had going for me in my life, I have decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out, right on this programme, a week from today...’ I don’t think I’m going to go as far as Howard Beale — the ageing, unfashionable newscaster that Peter Finch played so wonderfully in the film Network, a role that rightly won him a posthumous Oscar — but I’ll make some points about my own poor ratings on this platform. The first is I’m not surprised. I began in journalism in the Eighties, working for the Bournemouth Evening Echo, where W. M. Hill, its perpetually pipe-smoking, old-school editor, took the view that journalists should report, but not be seen. He regarded bylines as pathetically self-indulgent and ostentatious. He abhorred the idea of journalists getting into showmanship or the cult of personality, and I suppose, because of his early influence, so still do I. Boris Johnson clearly didn’t have anyone like the austere W. M. Hill keeping an eye on him as he was starting out in journalism. On account of the Johnson family’s connections — the old schoolboy network, Eton etc — he didn’t of course have to do local newspapers as long as I did (Highbury College of Technology, Portsmouth, National Council of Journalists Pre-entry Course). I don’t actually feel aggrieved about that because local newspapers turned out to be the most fun I ever had in my career and they certainly taught me what life is actually all about, in big country houses or council estates. Johnson, however, got something I was slow to twig about journalism as the Millennium turned: the internet had made journalism purely about the showmanship of journalists and the cult of their personalities.
