Contempt

There is a whole class of columnists who serve readers lukewarm piss labelled up as champagne (sham pain? — subs to check)

I’m still recovering from my health scare so this is shorter than some editions. I hope you enjoy it and please check out my new podcast with Sasha Baker. It’s called Prominent Corrections and it covers a lot of the topics I explore in this newsletter but from a different perspective.

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Robert Crampton hasn’t watched Succession. You might ask: “Who is Robert Crampton?” and additionally, “Why do I care if he’s watched Succession?” But these questions are of no concern to The Times, where the artist formerly known as Phil Space plies his trade. There is a column to be filed — ‘Giles Coren is Away’, though sadly not permanently — and the yawning void of white space demands the kind of platitudes and smuggery that bad old Giles hangover dumps onto the page weekly with his characteristically reliably contempt.

So Crampton explains why he hasn’t watched Succession:

I haven’t watched Succession. There, I’ve said it

One person’s zeitgeist TV is another’s big unknown, and we’re all in cultural bubbles. Where’s Hilda Ogden when you need her?

I thought the category of column where a hack explains to the reader why they haven’t seen a particular TV show, heard of a particular celebrity, or listened to an album since wax cylinders would have died off years ago. It is a non-category, a tacit confession of no ideas and of no desire to generate some.

If, by some Lord of Misrule arrangement, I was placed in charge of the comment desk at one of the nationals, a lot of the columnists who have grown accustomed to being among the most contemptuous would have their copy ping-ponged right back to them with the pro forma note:

Don’t you think the reader deserves a bit better than your lukewarm piss? 

I wouldn’t last in the job long but by fuck, I’d have a great time doing it.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of ‘contempt’ and what writers (and editors) owe readers since I read a Press Gazette interview with Will Welch, GQ’s global editorial director, in which he used the word “brand” far more often than the words “reader” and “audience”.

It was this answer that sent me into full Joker mode:

The other thing that’s really important to understand as a global media brand is that every story is local. There’s no such thing as a global story – the world itself does not birth an interesting story, whether it’s a celebrity that we’re covering or an incredible long-form yarn that we’re reporting out. All of it happens someplace super specific.

So every story is local and through this global leadership committee, we’re able to raise ideas that come from all around the world, analyse them and also talk about big projects that we’re going to embark on together. So what does it mean for this longstanding tentpole programme of GQ’s Men of the Year? What does it look like in the global era?

I’ve heard this kind of rap before; it’s the huckster patter of every publisher who thinks the way to sell advertising and seal commercial partnerships is to pump out the lowest common denominator product. GQ still produces a lot of good and entertaining journalism but it is absolutely drowning in sponsored content and ‘brand activations’. When print was paramount for those glossy brands, they cared more about the reader who bought that magazine. Now, just as you are the product on social media, you’re a data point to be sold to “clients” in the addled minds of ‘media brands’ like GQ.

Take another answer from the Welch interview:

He said the proposition had proved “really powerful just because there’s not another media brand with a men’s focus or with a men’s fashion focus that is organised in this way and that has this level of global presence. So I think we’ve really been able to separate ourselves from the competition…”

But it was necessary to “stay open-minded and flexible and see what worked and what didn’t” as longstanding clients needed to be brought along, and even if GQ’s plans were global many advertising budgets are still local.

“There’s this understanding from the clients that they are able to use us in this powerful, new, global way, but that isn’t necessarily how they’re organised,” Welch said. “But we’re still obviously organised that the budget can be spent locally, but there’s still opportunity to be unlocked on that front, which is exciting because I just see it as growth ahead.

The contempt for readers trickles down from the top, through the layers of the newsroom, and down to reporters and columnists. Day in, day out, the national newspapers fill their pages with stories and columns with the thumb-biting, eye-rolling perspective of a contemptuous media class; an industry that often thinks of its readers as ‘civilians’ and rubes, even as their numbers dwindle. The British media is just one example of many industries where the seller hates the consumer; huge swathes of the press and wider media think their audience is stupid and are not afraid to tell them that in the most brazen way.

Appearing on Chris Evans’ Virgin Radio show (owner: News Corp), Stig Abell (employer: News Corp) claimed he wrote the first of his three upcoming crime novels for Harper Collins (a subsidiary of News Corp) “before considering publishing it, just for the joy of it”. That’s contempt for the reader. Abell — who jumped from the Press Complaints Authority to offer a thin pretence of propriety to The Sun as its Managing Editor (nodding through Katie Hopkins’ notorious ‘asylum seekers = cockroaches’ before being rewarded for his loyalty with the editorship of The Times Literary Supplement (there was no interview) and then the co-host spot on the breakfast show for Times Radio (a station he was tasked with setting up) — is a made man at News Corp.

Any other debut novelist would be far less likely to be gifted a fawning profile in The Times and Abell’s “aww shucks, a good review from The Times” act is contempt again, just delivered beneath the veneer of the same faux humble bullshit that means his work uniform is always a ratty grey t-shirt while his female co-hosts actually have to bother because society does not allow them to choose “I slept in the studio and cannot find my razor” as an aesthetic.

Elsewhere on his easy mode tour of the British media, Abell turned up in the i paper with a first-person feature on why he has no friends. Curiously there’s no mention of being a bagman for the media’s most evil man, nor of his past as excuse maker in chief for The Sun. Instead, being 43 and without friends (a ginned-up claim anyway) is presented as just another success for the man who willingly calls himself ‘Stig’. Loneliness and the struggle of making friends when you’re a grown-up are interesting topics but what Abell offers is boasting dressed up as personal revelation:

My wife is the only friend I need… I tell everyone that I am the luckiest person alive to have met someone – Nadine – who makes me happy, keeps me sane, and – 18 years after we first met – is still hot enough to tingle my very toes every time I see her. If you have a friend with benefits, you’re not so bothered to have one without.

I’m also extremely lucky to have my wife but if I told her she was the “only friend I need” she would tell me to cop on and get out of the house for a few hours. My wife is my wife (and my favourite human); my best friend is my best friend.

But somehow the wife guy arrogance is not the worst bit of Abell’s piece; it’s the tedious fetishisation of books:

Stay with me on this one. I’m not sure you’ve ever thought about this, but books are better company than most folk. They are endless and generous, wide-ranging and surprising, and take you away from the humdrum of reality. They contain multitudes. You can fit them in your pocket, shut them when they get tiresome, and get a brand-new experience any time you want. An evening out in a noisy pub is almost always a pain (be honest), an evening in with a book almost never is.

When I collapsed last weekend and was really scared for my life, my books did fuck all. My friends called, texted, messaged, and posted to tell me they cared. Yes, they are not as cleanly convenient as a book you can pick up and put down but I don’t want that from other human beings: I’m not a sociopath.

But on that topic, let’s talk about Dan Wootton, GB News gonk and perpetual contender for the Worst Journalist (And Human Being) In Britain championships. Wootton is making another strong run in this year’s standings. His latest spittle-flecked rant for MailOnline adds to his library of unhinged articles on Meghan and Harry. In it, he writes — about Harry attending the Coronation but Meghan staying home for her son’s 4th birthday — that:

It's reputation vandalism of the highest order – and it means Harry and Meghan should be permanently banished just like the Nazi sympathising Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson before them.

Personally, I've been clear I think Charles should have long ago ripped up Harry and Meghan's invitation. Their typically rude refusal to stick to the RSVP date gave him the perfect opportunity to do just that.

Back in December 2022, Wootton was using his GB News programme to argue that Harry and Meghan should be BANNED from the Coronation. He’s actually livid that Meghan will not provide him with the material he needs for a real wobbler about her ‘upstaging’ Kate, walking ‘wrong’, or just existing while mixed race and married to a member of the British Royal Family.

Whatever Meghan does will be wrong by Wootton’s terms because the anger means attention and the attention means he keeps his MailOnline column and perch at GB News. He has contempt for his readers and viewers because he doesn’t even pretend to hide the inconsistency of his views or the emptiness of his endless bloviating rage. Even those who hate Meghan should realise that Wootton is using them; all he cares about is continuing to loom up on TV screens like Big Brother with a dodgy fake tan.

I could fill volumes with examples of columnists who have contempt for their audiences — ‘Giles Coren is away’ — but I’m going to finish up today with one more example from The Daily Telegraph. Our old ‘friend’, Charles Moore — Sam Eagle’s egregious cousin — beneath the headline Why is the Left in the driving seat of government after 13 years of Tory rule? begins:

Three headlines on the front page of this newspaper on Friday. The first – what journalists call the “splash” – said “Deaths rise as junior doctors go on strike”. The second: “Tories delay ‘seven recycling bins’ plan over fears of backlash”. The third: “Women cannot have a penis, says Sunak”.

The subjects were unrelated, but they raised the same question in my mind: “How have we reached a situation in which such stories exist at all?”. Of course more people could die if junior doctors strike. Of course making people arrange their household rubbish into seven bins will annoy them. Of course women cannot have penises.

That is contempt again and contempt built on the (probably valid) assumption that the media literacy of Telegraph readers is somewhere south of the average cnidarian. Why were those three headlines on the front page of the Culture War Chronicle on Friday? Because the editors of that formerly august but now just bust outlet wanted to anger the readers and Moore is doubling down.

Each of those stories is misrepresented by the Telegraph to serve its political position. The answer to: “How have we reached a situation in which such stories exist at all?” is that columnists like Moore and newspapers like the Telegraph have been at this for years — twisting, distorting, undermining, and misreporting — to produce ‘stories’ (not news) that terrify their readers and appeal to their basest instincts.

It’s a venal sort of contempt. Moore and the Telegraph alike have no interest in reporting on the world we all share; they would prefer to paint a terrifying woke dystopia in which the only voice of reason is… Charles Moore.

Now that’s a true nightmare. And one that really does deserve contempt.

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