Most people are idiots most of the time, and those that are not are idiots some of the time. That is my greatest annoyance and greatest advantage, my bane and my life, and any other wonderfully eloquent dual metaphor you care to use.
“Words are, after all, flimsy things, like puppets really; in the hands of a novice they get tangled, fighting each other in an ugly display of flailing appendages and broken strings, the last remnants of the little control that was ever held over them relinquished, leaving nothing but a tangled wreck. In the hands of a master, they can act, dance, persuade, and entertain without stopping. They can mean anything and nothing, they can contradict themselves without conflict, they can mesmerise an audience until it is eating out of the palm of their hand and then pull the rug from beneath them if it helps to serve their purpose. It can make them willing passengers on a journey to any destination desired.”
That was part of a speech an experienced (read senile) journalist gave me when I first started my own career working part-time on a village gazette while desperately submitting articles to larger publications. And that’s what he was like: pompous, foolish, always banging on about what he called “proper journalistic style and content”, always so snobbish and condescending about every word I wrote.
I was naïve and stupid enough to believe him for a while, and I got nothing published anywhere other than the odd heavily edited piece in that old rag of his. That’s when I realised the truth, and saw him and his precious values for what they were: fossilised and out-dated. I hadn’t left school at sixteen to dedicate myself to a small, unknown paper that was lucky to sell fifty copies a week. So I changed, I turned to true journalism, and within ten years I managed to achieve what he failed to even come within sniffing distance of “ I became the top columnist for the best-selling newspaper in the country. In short I was the best journalist in the country; he was never even the best in his village.
I was the best, and I lost it all. No, I had it taken from me, by that arrogant, pompous, snip of a girl, Hermione Granger, she who thinks herself so intelligent and wise to the ways of the world. Those who think themselves clever are always the ones most surprised when they find things aren’t as they thought. I remember the look on her face when I corrected her misguided views on journalism. She thought the Prophet was a vehicle of propaganda, peddling ideas to the masses for a determined and shadowy end. Nothing so high-minded, the so-called intelligentsia always want to over-complicate things, always want to see a huge complex strategy in everything, so much so that they miss the simplest and usually correct answer.
The Prophet has one basic purpose and that is simply its name, profit, and that is the essence of true journalism. That is what all those intellectuals never understand. I left school with no more than a handful of OWLs it is true (I had my specialties, I was great in subjects I was good at, but if it didn’t interest me I didn’t learn it. I already knew where I was going, a profession where nothing matters but selling power) but I realised, I saw what they didn’t, and it got me to the top. They can bang on about what should and should not be reported as much as they like, but at the end of the day it’s the bottom line of the accounting sheet that matters, and to balance the books you have to write what most people want to read.
They can turn their noses up at aiming for the “lowest denominator” and take it as their right to declare what is and isn’t newsworthy, always following that with declarations that the freedom of the press is vitally important. What they don’t see is what’s right under their turned up noses, namely that journalists are not educators and that newspapers have no social responsibility to report only what certain self-appointed arbiters decide they want to read about. That’s restriction of the press as much as any politician’s pressure to focus stories how he wishes.
Newspapers are businesses and, as with all businesses, the bottom line counts for everything. Journalists are workers, and need to put the bread on the table as much as anyone else, trust me. I spent years of high-minded “high quality” journalism, and the things that go with that; skipping breakfast and going out to restaurants with people (mostly men) I hated because they’d pay, and I hated being hungry more than I hated them.
I became an animagus to discover important information I felt the public should be aware of, but it appeared they weren’t really interested in the dubious credentials of a new junior minister when a senior one was sleeping with his secretary.
It was over a coffee breakfast with a particularly odious man (he paid heavily for the privilege) when I realised what I’d missed. I was rather viciously attacking several rashers of bacon and blissfully contemplating an assault on the egg while he (having finished his croissant and orange juice) was flicking through a paper and moaning that there was nothing he wanted to read in it. That’s when it hit me, when lightning struck; time stood still, and cliché suppliers got a boost in their pay cheques. A journalist who wished to eat regularly and buy clothes from shops unaffiliated with charities couldn’t afford to pick and choose regarding the stories they wrote. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, not a hobby. Articles lots of people liked to read put food in the cupboard and clothes on the back, while articles a couple of arrogantly over-educated people liked put a small thrill in the head but left a hollow feeling in the stomach.
I made my choice, and from then on I was on the gravy train to success and all its wonderful trappings. I have no regrets about that. Only the public can decide what’s newsworthy, only fools try and go against the flow, or only people rich enough to insulate themselves from reality. Hermione Granger and her ilk will never live on the breadline, so they’ll never find out how harsh reality can be, so they’ll never leave their ivory towers and find out what the world really is. If anything, my stories are the most democratic it’s what the public wants. I’m not sneering at anyone and tell them that what they’re reading is too puerile for anyone but idiots to read.
Had she known what she was reducing me to, I wonder if she’d have forced me into the deal I had to accept. I had to quit the Prophet with no believable explanation and I spent all my savings during my enforced yearlong sabbatical. Editors are egotistical gits, and they don’t take kindly to their minions walking out on them. I was back almost on the breadline, though my former status meant that I got some freelance work. But compared to what it was my life is nothing, my “friends” don’t even return my owls.
I don’t know how, but I’ll make it back to the top, I don’t care how I have to do it, I don’t care whose sanctimonious disapproval I have to invoke; I just know that I’m going to do it, I will not be kept down. This is not the last the world will see or hear of Rita Skeeter.
An Insider's View by CCCC
Chapter Notes: It's been awhile, but here's the next one. Rita Skeeter to be exact. Thanks to a very disreputable Jenna for betaing.