The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: FT.com / Home UK / UK – Last-ditch effort to save a column from Armageddon.

I noticed years ago that every time I read an article about something I knew, it was wrong. I am not sure why it took so long to realise that all the other articles were wrong too. By definition, journalists are experts in nothing but journalism.

Some are sensible however. Some are witty. Lucy Kellaway’s writing in the FT, for example, is a regular source of delight. She has a delicate way of skewering pretensions with no apparent malice. In the linked column, she writes about the current spate of linguistic inflation. I linked to it without logging on to my FT.com account, so you should be able to read it too;

"This is the worst column I’ve written since 1929.

In scenes not seen in living memory, last Thursday in a late night session, I hammered out the fiendishly complicated details of this article in a last-ditch effort to inject some sense into the system. At 8.05pm, the lights were on in my first floor study and, anticipating a long and tense night ahead, I put in an order to the local curry house for a balti. When the foil wrappers had been cleared and with the clock ticking, I started feverishly drafting sentences about the changed landscape that we are in, the most toxic since the Great Depression. Ashen-faced and reeling, at 1.40am I rose. How would the package go down with shell-shocked readers? Would they roar their approval? Or would their confidence plummet in the worst collapse since the 1930s? Only time would tell."

Do click through and read the whole thing. She lays into the ludicrous comparisons with 1929.

"Irving Kahn, now 102, was last week
interviewed on the BBC World Service and crisply said that today
"things are a great deal better. People are spoiled". The main
villains, he said, were the journalists – "the reporters who want to
get attention writing up headlines saying how bad it is".

So is he right? Certainly the current reporting has been bad. So bad, in fact, it has been the worst since . . . 1929."

Bloggers are often unkind about MSM journalists. Sometimes with good cause. Their profession certainly has its full quota of rogues, charlatans and fools. Yet while it may be true that the best bloggers are better to read than the best journalists, it’s beyond doubt that the worst of us is worse than the worst MSM hack. We should occasionally acknowledge that not only is journalism our meat and drink, but that sometimes it tastes pretty good. If Lucy Kellaway’s column were a restaurant, it would rate three macarons.