Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What should journalism aspire to be?
I like HL Mencken’s dictum – it’s the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I suppose I’ve done more of the latter than the former in my career, but still. Another dictum I like is the one Kenneth Tynan pinned up above his writing desk: “Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.” I’ve tried to do that, too.
How has the media changed since its early beginnings?
It’s gradually become more respectable, which is a bad thing. Luckily, the Internet is making it less respectable again. To paraphrase Ben Hecht, journalists should occupy a rung on the status ladder somewhere between whores and bartenders.
What is journalism at its worst?
Panjandrums like Tom Baldwin – an apologist for Gordon Brown while on The Times and now Ed Miliband’s press secretary – who instead of speaking truth to power simply suck up to the powerful. I remember seeing a photograph on the Vanity Fair contributor page of a member of staff with his arm around Tom Cruise, grinning from ear to ear – the same journalist who had interviewed Cruise in that issue. I thought, “That interview won’t be worth reading.”
Talking of bad practice, you've been particularly excoriating towards disgraced reporter Johann Hari. I enjoyed your fisking of his too-little too-late apology. What precisely was it that Hari did which was inexcusable?
Hari’s crime wasn’t to lift quotes from other people’s interviews and insert them into his own without attribution. That’s borderline acceptable. Rather, his crime was to do that and deliberately give the impression that the people in question had said those things to him. In addition, creating a fake identity on Wikipedia and using it to trash people on his political enemies list was pretty low. If Hari had been a News of the World journalist, those things wouldn’t have mattered that much. But because he’s a holier-than-though, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth, world-class prig, they do.
Is British journalism particularly nasty? What is your take on the phone hacking scandal and red-top tabloids in general?
I’m a fan of red tops and regret the closure of The News of the World. In the furore following The Guardian’s story that the deletion of Milly Dowler’s phone messages had given false hope to her parents, all the important stories The News of the World had broken over the years got overlooked. Let’s not forget, it broke the cricket match-fixing story, the Jeffrey Archer story and many others. It didn’t just deal in celebrity tittle-tattle, it also exposed corruption and many powerful people will be sleeping more easily now that the Screws has closed.
How did you rate Christopher Hitchens?
I liked Hitchens personally, admired his courage and thought he was right about Islamofascism and the Iraq war, but found most of his journalistic output unreadable. He had this verbose, hyperarticulate, mannered style that I just couldn’t stomach. I didn’t usually get beyond the first paragraph. I prefer reading his brother, Peter.
Tell us why you chose Scoop as your first book.
Others have tried to write comic novels about journalism – Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn, for instance – but Scoop has yet to be bettered and I doubt it ever will be. I re-read it recently and was struck by how unchanged Fleet Street is, 80 years after it was written. One of my best friends is a foreign correspondent and he’s reported on several shooting wars from the saloon bar of the InterContinental Hotel. In my mind’s eye, I can picture Evelyn Waugh giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry.
It’s clearly intended to be a vituperative satire, but it’s hard not to detect some affection for the loathesome hacks that appear in its pages, partly because they’re so accurately drawn. Could someone capable of describing them so perfectly not harbour any warm feelings towards them? Let’s not forget that Waugh himself was one of them for a considerable period of time, and never turned his back on the Streets of Shame.
How did you discover Ben Hecht’s book Child of the Century?
I discovered Ben Hecht through His Girl Friday, one of the few great Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s that he didn’t write. It was based on The Front Page, a play that Hecht co-authored with Charles MacArthur when they were both Chicago newspapermen. The Front Page is a vicious satire of drink-sodden hacks and the papers they worked for, but it’s also a tribute to them. Walter Burns, the central character, keeps company with crooks and ne’er-do-wells, and employs every black art in the book to get stories, but he also brings down a cabal of corrupt politicians. In that respect, he’s a model of what all good tabloid editors should aspire to be – and indeed many are.
Needless to say, Hecht and MacArthur’s colleagues, many of whom were the models for the characters in the play, absolutely loved it. Jed Harris, the play’s original producer, wrote an account of the reception the play got on its opening night:
“It was one of the marvels of The Front Page that although all the characters were actual people, nobody ever thought of suing us for invasion of privacy. Indeed, they all turned up for the opening night in Chicago and simply wallowed in delight. When the curtain fell at the end of the first act, the roar that rose from the audience sounded like the bellowing of a herd of wild animals panicked by a fire in a zoo. Above this din one great monster of a voice could be heard yelling: ‘MAKE IT MORE PERSONAL.’”
A Child of the Century is Hecht’s autobiography and it spans his career, not just as a journalist, playwright and screenwriter but as a literary novelist as well. In an essay written in the 1960s, the film critic Pauline Kael said that Hecht wrote almost half the entertaining movies ever produced in Hollywood and she’s not far off. His credits include Gunga Din, The Prisoner of Zenda, Stagecoach, Gone With the Wind, Spellbound, Strangers on a Train and Cleopatra. I love Ben Hecht and for many years aspired to have a career like his. One of the reasons I was so disappointed by New York journalism when I lived there in the mid-to-late nineties is because I didn’t meet anyone like him.
Toby Young is a British journalist and author of the memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. He is an associate editor of The Spectator, where he writes a weekly column, and a blogger for The Daily Telegraph. Young is also co-founder of the West London Free School and his newly published e-book is How To Set Up a Free School. He writes a blog called No Sacred Cows, and tweets as @toadmeister
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