Journalism

As I write, the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is flying to China. So I am only guessing when I say that I expect he will ‘raise’ the case of Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher, businessman and Democratic party supporter, a British citizen. Mr Lai has now been imprisoned in Hong Kong for four years with his numerous trials not yet completed. ‘Raise’, yes, but not as in ‘do anything about’ the situation. So far, the best the Foreign Office has done is to ‘request consular access’ to Mr Lai.

Once upon a time, in a land faraway, CBS was called the “Tiffany Network.” The network’s glittering jewel was its news division. This is the story of that division’s decline and fall, driven by partisan goals and leftist ideology. CBS News gained its fame in the 1940s, under the leadership of Edward R. Murrow, who not only painted a vivid word-picture of London during the Blitz, but also recruited the best broadcast journalists in the business. For decades, they formed the core of CBS News, first on radio and then on television. That tradition continued through the 1960s, when tens of millions of Americans turned to Walter Cronkite for an honest report of the day’s news. If the newscast included editorial comments, as it sometimes did, they were offered by Eric Sevareid.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who died last month aged 90, was perhaps most famous for his dictum that: ‘Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.’ This is often known as the focusing illusion. The theory explains, say, why a recent Lottery winner with bad toothache may, in the moment, be little happier than a skint person with bad toothache, since in both cases their attention is focused on the pain, not their financial situation. When Trump rails about ‘fake news’, I suspect this resonates with voters much more than journalists actually realise It is an important bias to understand, not least because it gives us a vital and often overlooked insight into media bias.

There is a recurring type of incident that reflects the insularity of today’s media class: “Everyone was talking about it, but no one reported it.” There is no stronger indictment of contemporary media bias — it doesn’t arise just out of partisanship, nor out of opposition to reporting stories that displease our ruling class. It reaches the point of actively lying and covering up things any average American knows to be true. The most prominent recent example is found in the reaction to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s findings regarding Joe Biden’s hoarding of classified documents.

My path to “media personality” (puke) and cultural commentator was not the usual one. I didn’t get a degree in Journalism or Broadcast Journalism or Communications. I didn’t go to Harvard or Columbia or Syracuse or Yale. In fact, I didn’t get a degree at all. This sets me apart from almost everyone in old-guard media — and were it not for new media and more importantly, social media, I would still probably be excluded by most of the establishment gatekeepers. Our mainstream media and late-night television rooms are dominated by people who went to Ivy League schools. The Harvard Lampoon guys. The Columbia School of Journalism kids.

"We are not the Fox News of the left,” says Tara McGowan. “We are legitimate journalism.” We are sitting in the lobby bar of the Edition Hotel in Manhattan as McGowan tells me about Courier, the network of local-news outlets she founded in 2019 after a successful career in Democratic politics. Courier, in McGowan’s telling, “is a network of pro-democracy newsrooms across the country that reach passive news consumers where they are with good factual local news and reporting.” McGowan rejects allegations that Courier is a partisan political operation masquerading as a news outlet. Courier isn’t pro-Democratic Party, she says. It’s “pro-democracy.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the "1619 Project”, almost brought herself to lift a finger in defense of affirmative action — almost. She took to Twitter on Thursday to denounce the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action. The anger was not strong enough, though, to make it worth picking up the pen. Hannah-Jones tweeted: “Was going to write an essay about it, but why even bother. (Also, Clarence Thomas is actually irrelevant here. So thanks but no thanks)” The Wall Street Journal’s new editor-in-chief has criticized the work ethic of the paper’s staff, but clearly the New York Times is not much better — Hannah-Jones wrote her last piece for the paper in February 2023, which itself was the first in two years.

The clamor of voices, the snapping of shutters, the dazing glare of bulb after bulb. A celebrity is whisked into a waiting car by a no-nonsense staffer, holding back the throng so they can make their escape. But just how easy is it to cause this scene? This week, I put on my most refined accent and dialed the number of a photo agency to find out.  “Hi, I’m a publicist and I have a new client looking to move from London to LA.” “What kind of client?” “She’s done a lot of reality TV and she’s a fashion influencer, mainly on TikTok. I’d prefer not to name her at this point.” “Ok. What are you looking for?” “I was — we were — hoping to create some buzz around the move, something that’ll get her into the papers.

Last week I was at a writers' party in Miami, a city at the cutting edge of tech, finance, the creator economy and nightlife. Naturally the writers were talking about themselves. I asked someone what he would do if he didn’t have to worry about pageviews or proprietors or the other pressing concerns of the modern media. “Think VICE, when it was good,” he replied. To me, VICE when it was good is the girl’s bum on the fiction issue from 2008. It’s Michael Moynihan’s raspy voice reporting from South Korea. It’s the floppy hair of the one super-hot reporter I knew that smoked filterless roll-ups. VICE was where the cool kids at the back of the bus would grow up to write, the place that you would daydream about working for as a young reporter.