Journalists you trust/admire/respect etc

luka

Well-known member
my default position on journalists is that i hate them cos they get paid to write and i get paid to stand in a carpark.

but, gracious as i am i will no give credit where it's due. i think robert fisk is a good thing and i think that gary younge in the guardian is one of the only people who can pull off those commentry opinion things. er, there's more i'm sure, but thats two off the headtop.

draw attention to the ones you hate too. i hate christopher hitchens for his public school bluster, lazy rhetoric, extreme intellectual sloppiness and for corrupting oliver craner.
 
I seem to hate more journalists than I respect.
I hate David Aaronovitch for being a lazy, pompous, arrogant twat.
I dislike Amanda Platell for similar reasons and the fact that she is the heir apparent to Lynda Lee-Potter.

I have a lot of respect for Gary Younge too, and also Darkus Howe and John Pilger (even though he sometimes strays into 6th form hyperbole).

I used to be a journalist, a financial journalist at that, so I am naturally filled with an excess of self-loathing too.
 

luka

Well-known member
yeah! aaronovitch! him and mark lawson are repellent twins made out of lard. imagine them on tv in a homosexual love scene. their fat waxy bodies on red silk sheets.

thats the sort of thing i like to think about.
 
Thanks for that Luka. I genuinely feel physically sick now.
I find Erwin James's columns in The Guardian fascinating, as he describes prison life and the transition to the outside world on release.
But I can't think of many journalists who really do it for me at the moment.
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
Daniel Finkelstein's column on football stats in the Saturday Times is great. He's not a half-bad columnist in the main paper either.

I find Anatole Koletsky reassuring - he always seems optimistic about the worst things.
 

Backjob

Well-known member
You don't realise how good y'all have it. I'd rather read Richard Littlejohn than "The Straits Times" singapore's anodyne, heavily censored national paper.

Francis Ween is good. I like those columns he does where he buries politicians' bullshit under a mountain of carefully researched facts.

George Monbiot is the most drivelsome columnist ever, on the other hand.
 
I buy the observer just to read what richard ingrams and dr john briffa have to say. tony thompson comes up with some good stuff on crime from time to time.

i rated nick cohen until he came out as pro-war over Iraq.

Michael Bywater can be nauseating - reads like Chris Morris's suicide journalist most of the time.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
"i rated nick cohen until he came out as pro-war over Iraq"

Why did you rate him and why ditch him over Iraq? I don't understand. I mean, how do you define a good journalist? Somebody you agree with all the time?
 
oliver craner said:
"i rated nick cohen until he came out as pro-war over Iraq"

Why did you rate him and why ditch him over Iraq? I don't understand. I mean, how do you define a good journalist? Somebody you agree with all the time?

Because I realised he is, in the final analysis, a bit of a pick'n'mix cunt, politically speaking.

"I detest Blair, he is the anti-christ. Well, except for his stand on the war in Iraq, he's dead right on that one"
 
oliver craner said:
"i rated nick cohen until he came out as pro-war over Iraq"

Why did you rate him and why ditch him over Iraq? I don't understand. I mean, how do you define a good journalist? Somebody you agree with all the time?

Also, you'd do well to re-read the topic: Journalists you trust/admire/respect. All the trust, admiration and respect I had for that particular journalist evaporated once his Iraq position became clear.

And I almost cancelled my subscription to the New Scientist magazine over there lemming-like fall over the WMD credibility cliff in early 2003. But then they ran an excellent piece on cubozoa (box jellyfish to you) and I was hooked again.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Well, I can see your point about New Scientist.

But what's the problem with Cohen disliking Blair on most points except one?

I'm similar to Cohen, I should declare, there aren't many things I actively like about Blair, but I do like his foreign policy.

But it's like this, I don't always <em>agree</em> with Seymour Hersh. But he's still one of the journalists I most admire. (And I should qualify: as a journalist, rather than a polemicist.)

Also, in Cohen's book about New Labour, mostly a massive dis, he proclaims and maintains his pro-war perspective, and makes better points about it than Blair did in public. It's not pick-and-mix: it's judgement, and principle.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I'm sorry, it's just that I think admiring journalists often comes down to simple agreement, or worse, constantly looking for them to confirm, or supply, personal preconceptions. Good journalism should challenge, as well as confirm, preconception and prejucide.

If you really admire a journalist, you're not going to ditch them because they express one point of view different to your own. If you do, or can, maybe you didn't admire them that much in the first place, or didn't think about it that much.

I don't mean to sound rude, actually. (For once.) I just don't understand you.

If you admire someone, and they surprise you, or shock you, or undermine your views, or you think they're wrong, or even if they dissapoint you, surely the least you can do, as an <em>admirer</em>, is fully digest their argument, understand how if fits or contradicts their other or previous work, <em>tackle it</em> in other words, rather than just ditch them immediately. That seems rather lazy to me.
 

jaybob

Member
apart from her suddenly deciding that accepting an honour would be a good idea after all, of course. very republican and true to principles that.

Surely a good journalist is one who makes you think and, therefore, the best journalists aren't those who simply stroke your egos and existing opinions. Pilger as an investigative journalist can obviously be enlightening, although he himself would probably admit to being a polemicist rather than an objective chronicler of events. Robert Fisk, these days, is just bombast. the same diatribe endlessly regurgitated and his role in the independent's transformation from newspaper journalism to magazine comment isn't to be admired.

I would definitely say aaronovitch is a good journalist, because, even if you disagree with him strongly (as i often do), he makes you think. he engages you in an argument. He's certainly a huge cut above someone like Hari in the independent who just spouts froth.

In the Guardian, I'd go for Jonathan Freedland. In the Observer, Andrew Ransley's weekly comment seems the best informed on what's happening inside new labour.
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
jaybob said:
I would definitely say aaronovitch is a good journalist, because, even if you disagree with him strongly (as i often do), he makes you think. he engages you in an argument. He's certainly a huge cut above someone like Hari in the independent who just spouts froth.


oh lord, aaronovich is a fcuking dick- perfect journalist for people like blair- dissents over no-important issues to sound edgy, tows the line over iraq, even though his arguments were weak. and he promised never to trust the gvt again if WMDs weren't found. guess what- he's still up tony's arse.
 

jaybob

Member
do you want a media that only criticises the party in power? obviously, the role of a well functioning foruth estate is a critical one, but ideally it should be constructive.

Are people like Polly Toynbee Blairite toadies because she's willing to explicate issues like Sure Start and poverty reduction, despite their unglamorous distance from WMD?
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
jaybob said:
do you want a media that only criticises the party in power? obviously, the role of a well functioning foruth estate is a critical one, but ideally it should be constructive.

Are people like Polly Toynbee Blairite toadies because she's willing to explicate issues like Sure Start and poverty reduction, despite their unglamorous distance from WMD?


i think in terms of their frame of reference they reflect mainstream political opinion. for example, toynbee being shocked that if you're poor your standard of living is shit- only people living in islington would find that shocking. it doesn't make them toadies, but as important journalists they're irrelevant
 
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