What knows he of England....
Good old Rudyard Kipling’s immortal line “What knows he of England, who only England knows?” has been a very useful guide to life for me for decades.
It is not just about the benefits of travelling and working widely, so that you can look at your own country with a realistic parallax view and see it as others do, with a clear eye.
It is also very useful to see the country as others of your kind do not and here journalism has a terrible problem. The career attracts the brightest and the best, the ambitious and the ultra confident (I am constantly amazed I survived at all). But the money is for the most part not great.
That means the high flyers who managed to make it even though they came from a poor family, with no academic ambitions or history and went to a failing comp rather than Eton, don’t as a rule go into the media. They go were the money is far better, the City, the law, consultancy, medicine, accountancy and they go to work for foreign firms who don’t give a damn if they drop their aitches, speak common and use the wrong fork when eating escargots.
This creates a real problem for journalism in the broadest sense, it is not just that the vast majority have never seen or experienced poverty, they fail to realise that their own effortless assent of the greasy pole has totally influenced their mind set.
It is far too easy to be in favour of zero hours contracts, “flexible” labour markets, benefit cuts, hire and fire, and capitalism red in tooth and nail if you are always going to win.
If you are a senior well known hack, educated at Oxbridge and private school, got a first without trying, won a scholarship to an Ivy League college, were head hunted by a top think tank or the Bank of England and then decided to try your hand at journalism for a laugh; you have no fear at all.
If it doesn’t work out ITN will bite your hand off, or Reuters or Bloombergs, or that hedge fund who want a high profile economist. You can always write that book on gardening your editor has been urging you to finish or present a TV series on “great tram journeys of the world”.
It is not just that you don’t understand the real lives of the vast majority of the people you speak to, you are totally immune to the pressures that dominate their existence.
And the really scary thing is, you don’t even realise that.
Maybe we should make every prospective journalist spend six months working in a Sunderland care home, it wouldn’t be perfect because they would know they could walk away any day, but I bet it would change their reporting for the better.
From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
Maybe this should apply to prospective MPs as well (though I’m not sure care homes would necessarily welcome the likes of Bojo or Gove)