If you want to get ahead in political journalism, you must learn how to take a banal, humdrum, and consensus opinion and make it appear groundbreaking. Much of what passes as hard-hitting or inside or investigative reporting is simple regurgitation—take a slow news day, a commonplace story, and add some spice until you’ve got a headline. This isn’t, of course, a new situation, though perhaps recent years have accelerated these timeworn practices.
A glance at the media might lead you to believe that new technologies and a dynamic culture have fundamentally changed news—but the grind of getting people to pay attention to headlines remains timeless. Nothing about the basic principles have changed, in fact, since the publication of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel about Fleet Street, which is still reasonably instructive when it comes to understanding the perverse incentives in the business of selling news.
‘You know, you’ve got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead. We’re paid to supply news. If someone else has sent a story before us, our story isn’t news.’
There’s no grand mystery behind why Scoop, in which an inept and obviously misplaced foreign correspondent is sent to the fictional country of Ishmaelia, has lasted all these years. Or why it is still quoted by a certain type of journalist. If you’ve ever taken the complex and distilled it into a false simplicity, you’ve lived in the world of Scoop; if you’ve ever shaded or massaged or just given the slightest nudge to the truth, you’re in Scoop; if you’ve ever set out with a dramatic narrative, you’re in the land of Scoop journalism; if you’ve ever written the story beforehand and simply filled in the blanks with realtime quotes—which happens quite often—you, too, live in Waugh’s newsroom. Journalists quote these lines because the novel bites with the shock of recognition rather than the shock of surprise.
One line, in particular, stands out for me, as it’s the line that I’ve heard quoted most often. It arrives when the main character receives his press card: “They were small orange documents, originally printed for the registration of prostitutes.” I don’t remember ever hearing this line without a knowing grin underneath the words. Don’t forget to linger for a moment and look for the client in that metaphor.
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