Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Part 1 Introductions and overviews
- 1 Introduction
- 2 A good tradition of love and hate
- 3 Heroes and villains – an overview of journalism on film
- 4 Journalism in film: 1997–2008
- Part II Heroes
- Part III Villains
- Appendix – Films about journalism, 1997–2008
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - A good tradition of love and hate
from Part 1 - Introductions and overviews
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Part 1 Introductions and overviews
- 1 Introduction
- 2 A good tradition of love and hate
- 3 Heroes and villains – an overview of journalism on film
- 4 Journalism in film: 1997–2008
- Part II Heroes
- Part III Villains
- Appendix – Films about journalism, 1997–2008
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
People love to hate the journalist’, wrote Lynda Ghiglione in 1990, identifying one strand of a long-standing cultural schizophrenia in public attitudes to the modern day heirs of Edmund Burke's Fourth Estate. The journalist is a hate figure, on the one hand, held responsible by many for the debasement of public discourse and the coarsening of society in general. The journalist is commonly referred to in these contexts as a hack, a reptile, a sleaze merchant revelling in other's miseries, a purveyor of cultural trash. The outspoken Tory MP and diarist, the late Alan Clark, typified this attitude when he wrote that journalists are ‘fellows with, in the main, squalid and unfulfilling private lives, insecure in their careers, and suffering a considerable degree of dependence on alcohol and narcotics’.
Clark was not alone in such thoughts (nor is the journalist alone in harbouring such vices, let us concede at the outset). His comments come from an essay included in a volume entitled Secrets of the Press: journalists on journalism. Clark reminds us that much of the loathing expressed for journalists is actually a form of self-loathing. Journalists often hate themselves, it seems, just as much as non-journalists do. In the scabrous words of one of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century, Hunter S. Thompson:
Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Journalists in FilmHeroes and Villains, pp. 9 - 22Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009