So You Want To Be a Journalist, Eh?

This piece, in the Times of London, is worth reading for many reasons, but most of all to show how far journalism — we used to call it “reporting” — has strayed from its mid-century ideal. To wit:

Nicholas Tomalin — the wonderful, bombastic Sunday Times writer who died in 1973 reporting from the Golan Heights — thought he knew the answer. In 1969, a happier time for the industry, he began a piece in this magazine by asserting: “The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.” But if Tomalin were commissioned now, he would strike out that famous gambit and start again.

Today, you’ll need luck, flair, an alternative source of income, endless patience, an optimistic disposition, sharp elbows and a place to stay in London. But the essential quality for success now is surely tenacity. Look around the thinning newsrooms of the national titles. Look at the number of applicants for journalism courses, at the queue of graduates — qualified in everything except the only thing that matters, experience — who are desperate for unpaid work on newspapers and magazines. Look at the 1,200 people who applied in September for one reporter’s position on the new Sunday Times website. You’d shoot a horse with those odds.

Tomalin’s 1969 piece has an enduring appeal for journalists. Indeed, his observation about rat-like cunning has become a kind of mantra for the industry, recycled at every awards dinner. Tomalin’s catalogue of “other qualities”, which are “helpful, but not diagnostic” to a career in journalism, is less well known: “A knack with telephones, trains and petty officials; a good digestion and a steady head; total recall; enough idealism to inspire indignant prose (but not enough to inhibit detached professionalism); a paranoid temperament; an ability to believe passionately in second-rate projects; well-placed relatives; good luck; the willingness to betray, if not friends, acquaintances; a reluctance to understand too much too well (because tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner and tout pardonner makes dull copy); an implacable hatred of spokesmen, administrators, lawyers, public-relations men, politicians and all those who would rather purvey words than policies; and the strength of character to lead a disrupted personal life without going absolutely haywire… Tomalin’s list rings true today. The “implacable hatred” section should be tattooed on the foreheads of all new arrivals, especially those who think journalism and PR are two parts of the same industry.

Well, aren’t they? The old rule was that a reporter could become a PR guy, but a PR guy could never become a reporter: once you crossed the line into open advocacy, you had forfeited all journalistic objectivity. British journalists may well retain some of that old-time insouciance and even contempt for authority — although their reporting is notoriously untrustworthy — but their American counterparts have long since abandoned shoe leather and a bad attitude for all the trappings of corporate punditry.

What was that about “an implacable hatred of spokesmen, administrators, lawyers, public-relations men, politicians and all those who would rather purvey words than policies” again? Far too many of today’s journalists are mere stenographers, who duly transcribe the talking points of political hacks on both sides of the aisle, but especially on the left.

At the higher levels, they scuttle about currying favor with their friends in government, hoping that when the next (usually Democratic) administration rolls around, they too can land a prize sinecure as press spokesman or, even better, a policy-maker. If not, they can always cool their heels for a while as the head of a liberal think-thank, such as the Brookings Institution or the Aspen Institute.

What the public needs to understand is that modern American journalism is light years away from the anything-goes wiseacres of The Front Page and the dogged, take-no-prisoners style of such great reporters as Meyer “Mike” Berger of the New York Times and Jimmy Breslin at the Daily News and Pete Hamill at the New York Post. Todays reporters — perhaps fearful of losing the jobs that give them access to their sources, so that they can repay their employers by saving the good stuff for their new books — look and act more like the sleek corporate fat cats, fawning courtiers and corrupt politicians they used to pillory. Now, it seems, they’re all part of the racket.

Back in 1969, Tomalin characterised journalism as the most meritocratic of professions, once you had entered “the charmed circle”. “Anyone who has got into the club,” he wrote, “has no right to complain. His talents are frequently and publicly on display to his colleagues and customers. He needs no formal system of grading, no office politics, to demonstrate how good, or bad, he is. The promotion system in journalism therefore works very simply and very well. By and large a News of the World man, or a Farmer & Stockbreeder man, or a Penthouse man, deserves to be where he is. If he pretends to be ashamed, it is only because cultural snobbery demand he be so — he is happier, and better suited, than he admits. Entry to the charmed circle is the thing.

What a different circle it is today.