Media professionals' odd mix of sour grapes, guilt and egalitarianism threatens to affect our chances of recovery, writes JOHN WATERS
EVERY SO often, a journalist peels him- or herself off from the pack and goes into PR, “consultancy” or the law, and immediately seems to become unfathomably richer. This syndrome is one of the great puzzles confronting modern journalists, who, on encountering former colleagues sporting off-season suntans or impossibly shiny shoes, are moved to wonder where it all went wrong for themselves. It is rarely helpful that the defectors are never the most outstanding scribes, but rather the kind who just made the first team and rarely put the ball in the net.
Because many journalists are well-known, people assume they are extravagantly well-paid, but this is not generally the case. In fact, journalism has, income-wise, remained among the middle-ranking occupations. Most journalists are paid reasonably well, but, apart from a few at the top end of the broadcast sector, not obscenely so.
People are attracted to journalism because they want to write, or exert influence in what appears to be a glamorous profession. Only later do some desire to get rich, and – too late – realise they’re in the wrong job. (I do not exclude myself from these judgments, except to the extent that, feeling blessed to have blagged my way into journalism at all, I still fear being discovered and ejected. I long ago accepted that there is nothing else anyone would pay me to do.) “The media” was not, generally speaking, one of those sectors in which it became possible to get rich during the boom years. For one thing, the Tiger years coincided with a period of increasing pressure from “new” media; for another, pay structures in media are – apart again from the upper reaches of the broadcast industry – tied into standard “partnership” norms.
For not unrelated reasons, journalism boasts a disproportionate number of what are called socialists. This is in part because many of the current big-name Irish journalists emerged out of the left-liberal revolution of the 1960s, but it may also be related to the unhappiness of many journalists on discovering that their payslips do not reflect their alleged influence or their public profiles.
Demands for redistribution are nowadays more likely to come from journalists than other professionals, including politicians. This arises from an odd mixture of egalitarianism, guilt and sour grapes. Interestingly, the better remunerated the journalist, the more likely he or she is to be incessantly demanding that other people be paid less or taxed more.
A frequent refrain of journalism in the past two years has been that Ireland “surrendered to materialism” in the Tiger years, lost the “run” of herself and became obsessed with getting rich. But even a cursory inventory of the average newspaper of recent times renders it difficult to avoid the conclusion that obsession with money has actually grown since the economy collapsed. About 60 per cent of news stories and perhaps 80 per cent of opinion columns these days are about banks, bankers, growth, deflation, budgets, taxation or some other money-related topic. The overall content might be summarised as betraying an obsession with other people’s money, which perfectly defines our present disposition.
The chief symptoms of our collective response to the meltdown of 2008 have been rage, guilt, envy and occasional demands for retribution and redistribution, all of which are readily traceable to the sentiments and attitudes of the journalistic profession. Once again, we seem to be moving towards lengthy public inquiries – arising mainly from the demands of journalists – which promise to swell further the bank balances of lawyers and PR consultants, thereby ensuring that journalists become even more disgruntled.
And this affects in a profound way the national response to present economic circumstances. For one thing, all this niggling and lamentation tends to make people unhappy, guilty, fearful and annoyed, so that the continuing obsession with the forensics of prosperity is now threatening to affect our chances of recovery, which, as any first-year economics student knows, will depend on the nurturing of optimism and confidence.
Moreover, the present discussion has created the impression that the problems have all been to do with greed and rogue bankers, when really the core problem relates to the engorgement of the State over recent decades. This is not merely an economic problem, but also a social, psychological and existential one, causing enormously increased pressures on citizens who are required to keep the monster alive. This situation was brought about largely at the insistence of some of the very commentators now leading the clamour for heads on spikes.
Perhaps, then, it is time to consider the extent to which our collective response to the collapse of the economy has been defined by attitudes that are neither representative nor productive, but arise mainly from the prejudices of the messengers.
In as far as you can sum up the “national” response to this crisis, you would have to conclude that, by and large, it corresponds to the outlook of the journalistic profession. It is hard to imagine that – if journalists were better paid, or if the national conversation were led instead by, say, priests – the current rage-and-blame phase would have lasted as long as it has.