Being a columnist? It’s just the new trendy illness
There are those who'd say that it's actually quite difficult being a columnist. You know, scratching around for something to write about, agonising over whether it's entertaining enough or not, wondering whether to do any research or not - and then just deciding to barrel through with some ill-informed prejudiced horseshit because you're of the school of hard knocks and tough luck and you reckon you know best:
Yes yes, I know. It's easy to mock. It may even feel right to mock someone so lacking in empathy, so ice-heartedly brutal, so lacking in compassion and understanding of other human beings and how they live their lives; it might seem like the most natural thing in the world to call them a purulent weeping wound on the arsehole of life. But would that be right? Would that be fair?
The Mail's defence of JSP's ignorant tripe sandwich to the PCC was, as ever, based on the right to offend by being completely fucking pig-ignorant and not doing any proper research, dressed up as 'well, she's entitled to her opinion'. It's one we've seen before towards Melanie Phillips's absolute tosh based on no credible evidence whatsoever regarding gay foster parents.
And of course that's true. If I had the opinion, for example, that all columnists are deviant scum who masturbate over pictures of raped kittens, that would be just an opinion as well, wouldn't it? But I think it would be wrong to express it if I couldn't be bothered to actually go and check for myself whether that was actually anything near to being the case or not - just out of, oh I don't know, a desire to try and be accurate as well as provocative, or wanting to have professional standards due to my privileged position of being able to have a platform in a national publication for my views, and wanting to get it somewhere near an approximation of correctness because of all that money I'm being paid, maybe. No...? Oh, no, then. Please yourselves.
So, it's pretty clear what columnists get paid for - to be provocative, not to be accurate. Say something controversial, whether it's true or not. And of course I'm all for freedom of speech, and I wouldn't like to see anyone prevented from doing so, not even the rubbish likes of Janet Street-Porter and chums. On the other hand, seeing as there is something called the PCC, why not try and be accurate in the first place? Why always fight complaints, rather than just admitting that you got it wrong because you did no research and couldn't be bothered to find out whether what you say was supported by any facts or not? Why be so fucking lazy?
More than anything, it's the pisspoor standards of these big-shot publications that is the real let-down, and again I find myself disappointed rather than angry. You'd kind of hope that every now and then one of these bozos would have their work chucked at them and be politely told that it's frankly not good enough - that they should anticipate or at least look into the counterarguments, if only to prove their own case. But maybe that's thinking too much. Maybe that's expecting too much. Just be provocative. Just say whatever you like, whether it's got any basis in truth or not; it doesn't matter, it's just a column that you get paid thousands of pounds a year to churn out. It doesn't matter that if you're shown to be wrong countless times, it erodes the credibility of everyone else working for the same organisation and trying their hardest to break real news? Why bother trying to make it right, so long as it's controversial?
Anyway, just for the record, as someone who has suffered miserably, deeply and profoundly throughout several years with the so-called 'trendy illness', let me just state that I haven't gone through it to pretend that I'm somehow fashionable or because I've got so much money that I don't know what to do with myself. A good clip round the ear doesn't actually work sometimes, and sometimes, some people are less capable of dealing with certain events and experiences than other people.
If you really can't understand that other people may experience the world differently than you, then all I have is pity rather than anger, because you must be a pretty vacuous piece of shit, and your life must be pretty empty - apart from all that misplaced hostility and ridicule towards people who can't help being any different from how they are, no matter how hard they try. Fuck you, and fuck your school of hard knocks attitude, Janet Street-Porter.
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Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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August 11th, 2010 - 16:09
Anton, I’ve been following your blog for a while now. I invariably agree with you, and will take this opportunity to applaud your writing.
I feel the need to comment on this story, as I have also suffered from this “trendiness” for quite some some time. I’ve just returned from a therapy appointment, in fact, and am feeling a little fragile. Knowing that some fuckwit thinks this struggle comparable to wearing my jeans too low makes me want to punch my fist straight through my laptop. Thanks for telling it as it is.
August 11th, 2010 - 17:09
Nice one, Anton!
After having had yet another bad day, ie not even being able to leave the house, and the only people I’ve opened the front door to today, have been Jehovah’s Witnesses delivering a pamphlet with a picture of the earth engulfed in flames, entitled ‘Is the end near?’, it’s rather reassuring once in a while to encounter an empathetic fellow human being, albeit a sort of virtual one.
I think the only way to get a modicum of truth about depression through to this hackneyed harpy would be via the medium of song and dance, à la Black Flag.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll fare better tomorrow…
August 11th, 2010 - 18:26
In fairness to JSP, her famous “depression” piece was supposedly re-written by Paul Dacre himself in a final FU to former columnist Allison Pearson, who departed the Mail with a piece all about how she’d been suffering from depression for years.
But yeah, good points.
August 11th, 2010 - 18:53
If that’s true, then that makes an even worse human being than I could have believed.
August 11th, 2010 - 21:30
if true is also says something about the mails defence to the pcc about both this and the phillips piece. it’s not so much about dacre defending his columnists right to have an opinion, but defending what his own opinion is.
August 11th, 2010 - 18:50
Apparently Private Eye wrote a few weeks back, that the column was a side sweep at a leaving Mail columnist, who claimed to leave the Mail due to depression at Paul Dacre’s editorship, who manged to get JSP to headline the attack piece after numerous others turned it down. Conveniently Dacre is head of the PCC, and so was able to provide cover for the complaints that would inevitably come.
August 11th, 2010 - 19:47
If that’s true, it says a lot about JSP’s personality that she let the piece go out under her own name. Perhaps she didn’t write all of it, but she was okay with her name being on it, and I’d say that indicates she agreed with the content. Which wouldn’t surprise me one bit, since she’s displayed a real talent for being an outright bitch often enough in the past.
August 12th, 2010 - 10:39
A small point, but Dacre isn’t actually head of the PCC. He’s chair of the PCC code committee that determines the standards to which the press are held (!).
I know it’s pedantic, but given Dacre was all over the media recently complaining that no-ones understands the PCC or what it does it’s as well to get these things right
August 12th, 2010 - 11:32
It’s kind of a shame that people have spent so many years taking the piss out of her horrible voice when they should have been taking the piss out of the fact that she’s a fucking moron.
August 12th, 2010 - 20:23
It’s depressing enough to think that an individual can be so spectacularly fuck-witted on any given subject, especially one that affects so many people in such a negative way, but for them to be allowed to smear their shit-thick ill thought-out views over a national newspaper, and actually get paid good money for doing so, is frankly insulting.
August 13th, 2010 - 09:49
In vague fairness, depression is like ‘political correctess’ there are two completely different versions.
There’s depression, which is a crippling illness and will render the average person a shut in.
Then there are people who go around saying “I’m depressed” as a synonym for ‘i am slightly less than spritely and perhaps i shall struggle to make it to zanzibar’s for wonderbras get in free night’ – that has become fashionable and those people need a swift kick in their bronzed faces.
August 13th, 2010 - 19:24
This is a good point actually, and something I considered mentioning. Like most people I’ve had periods in my own life where I’ve been truly miserable, but I don’t think I’ve ever suffered from genuine clinical depression, and wouldn’t claim that I have. My best friend on the other hand has struggled with it for years, so I know perfectly well what it does to people.
Come to think of it, perhaps JSP holds these opinions because a great many of the ‘depressed’ people she’s met are indeed wanky overpaid media types who wouldn’t know genuine despair if it smacked them in the heavily botoxed mouth and are just feeling a bit shitty because they’re out of coke? Just a thought.
August 13th, 2010 - 12:16
when people say “it’s just my opinion” they mean “what i think is badly thought out, and probably factually incorrect, however, i’ve heard you are allowed to have an opinion, no matter how faulty”
“it’s just my opinion” really means “what i am saying is rubbish, and i can’t really defend it”
August 15th, 2010 - 17:54
I was fascinated by JSP for years – she reminded me a lot of lower middle class career women I grew up with, and I wanted to understand as much as possible how such people tick. I concluded, after several years of watching her on TV and reading her shit, that JSP is so devoted to her own little self that she doesn’t give a genuine fuck about anyone else on earth, except in as much as it has any impact of what matters to her, or perhaps – when she’s feeling particularly indulgent – on her own petri-dish shallow sentimentality. I consider such a worldview the equivalent of spiritual suicide – and so I pity her, too.