Who Asked the Journalists?

“Everyone laughed.”

Apparently, everyone is always laughing.

A politician gives an answer. A presenter raises an eyebrow. Somebody makes a sarcastic remark. By lunchtime, a journalist has declared that “everyone” is laughing at it.

Who is everyone?

Usually, it means a few other journalists, broadcasters and political operatives sitting in the same studio, scrolling through the same social-media feeds and repeating the same jokes to one another.

It does not mean everyone in Birmingham, Bracknell, Glasgow, Hull or Swansea. It does not mean the care worker finishing a night shift, the tradesman sitting in traffic, the renter receiving another increase or the small-business owner wondering whether the numbers still work.

It means everyone in the room.

British journalism has developed a remarkable habit of mistaking proximity to power for knowledge of the country. Its most prominent figures interview ministers, attend launches, receive briefings and speak to one another all day. Eventually, they begin to believe that this access has made them uniquely perceptive.

Sometimes it has merely made them familiar.

The profession and the club

There are really two British journalism industries.

The first contains the reporters doing the actual work: covering courts, council meetings, hospitals, strikes, elections and local businesses. They make telephone calls, check documents, build contacts and try to produce accurate copy under impossible deadlines.

Many are not highly paid. Trainee newspaper reporters can begin on little more than £20,000. Journalists with several years of experience may earn somewhere in the low-to-mid £30,000s. Freelancers can face even greater uncertainty.

The second industry is the club.

It contains the national columnists, political commentators, executives, presenters and permanently available talking heads who appear across newspapers, radio, television and podcasts. They are the people invited to explain Britain to Britain.

This group is not representative of the country.

That is not a minor imbalance. It is a class system with a press pass.

These people are not necessarily unintelligent. Many are perfectly capable. But Britain repeatedly confuses capability with exceptional brilliance when it appears in the correct accent, carrying the correct surname and emerging from the correct university.

A journalist asks a shallow question in a confident voice and we are expected to treat it as forensic scrutiny. A columnist converts a personal prejudice into 900 words and it becomes national commentary. A presenter interrupts an answer repeatedly and the clip is circulated as evidence of a “brutal takedown.”

Quite often, nobody has learned anything.

Low pay protects privilege

The relatively low salaries at the bottom of journalism do not disprove its class problem. They help create it.

Consider what entering the profession can require: a university degree, specialist training, unpaid or poorly paid placements, time spent building a portfolio, and several years surviving on a junior salary—frequently in London.

Who can afford that?

A person whose family can help with rent, provide a place to live, arrange an introduction or cushion a period without regular income has a completely different chance of remaining in the industry from somebody who must support themselves immediately.

The profession can appear meritocratic because its junior employees are not earning fortunes. But the ability to tolerate low pay is itself often subsidised by family wealth.

The door is technically open. The entrance fee is simply hidden.

That is how an industry can underpay its workers while remaining dominated at its most influential levels by people from comfortable backgrounds. Those without money or connections are filtered out long before the salaries improve and the national platforms arrive.

Those who remain may then interpret their survival as proof that they were simply more talented.

The surname is part of the CV

Rachel Johnson is an obvious example of how the British media works.

It would be dishonest to say that she had no journalistic career before her brother became prime minister. She worked for the Financial Times, the BBC and several magazines, edited The Lady and wrote novels. Boris Johnson did not personally manufacture her entire professional life.

But it would be equally ridiculous to pretend that the Johnson name has no commercial value.

Once Boris became one of the country’s dominant political figures, Rachel Johnson was no longer merely another journalist. She was Boris Johnson’s sister: a bookable identity, a familiar surname and a ready-made source of programmes, columns and panel appearances.

Britain loves to turn members of already prominent families into independent public personalities and then acts as though the family connection is incidental.

The same ecosystem continually recycles familiar people. Politicians become columnists. Advisers become presenters. Editors become broadcasters. Broadcasters become podcasters. Failed candidates become commentators. Relatives of public figures become celebrities with opinions about public life.

Nobody needs to conspire. The machinery runs on recognition, contacts and mutual familiarity.

The people commissioning the programme already know the person being booked. The producer knows that the surname will attract attention. The guest knows how to perform in a studio. Everyone involved can call it merit because nobody has formally written “connected family required” on the job description.

The revolving media door

Stefano Hatfield’s career illustrates another part of the system.

Hatfield held senior positions at Campaign, Metro New York, the News International-owned London Paper, the Independent and the i, before becoming editorial director of London Live.

Working for a Murdoch-owned publication does not automatically make every subsequent opinion false. That would be too easy and, more importantly, unnecessary.

The revealing point is how small and self-contained the senior media world is.

The same people move between newspapers, magazines, television stations, digital ventures and public events. A publication closes; another editorship appears. A television launch struggles; another project follows. Senior media figures rarely disappear from the network because their greatest professional asset is membership of the network itself.

This creates a common culture even where political opinions differ.

A liberal columnist and a conservative columnist may argue bitterly about Brexit, tax or immigration, while sharing remarkably similar assumptions about which people are serious, which qualifications matter, which neighbourhoods exist, which voices sound authoritative and which economic inconveniences are merely theoretical.

They can disagree about the management of Britain without ever questioning who has been authorised to describe it.

Asking questions is not the same as understanding

Journalists often present themselves as intermediaries between power and the public. At their best, that is exactly what they are. Serious reporting exposes wrongdoing, records what institutions would prefer to hide and gives the public information it could not obtain alone.

But holding a microphone does not automatically make somebody an expert.

Much of modern political journalism has become theatre built around the appearance of interrogation. The objective is not always to understand an answer. It is to generate conflict, force an embarrassing phrase or create a clip that can be posted before the interview has finished.

The politician arrives with prepared lines. The journalist arrives with prepared interruptions. Both perform their roles. Afterwards, the media discusses who “won.”

Meanwhile, the underlying subject remains unexplained.

How does the policy work? Who will administer it? What will it cost? Does the workforce exist? What happened when something similar was attempted before? Which institution has the power to enforce it?

Those questions require research, patience and sometimes technical understanding. Asking, “Isn’t this just another embarrassing U-turn?” requires considerably less.

The interviewer can still look aggressive. The politician can still look uncomfortable. The audience receives heat without light.

“Everyone” means people like us

The deeper problem is not that journalists have opinions. Everyone has opinions.

It is that a narrow professional class possesses the power to convert its own reactions into a national mood.

A handful of columnists decides that the public is furious. A television panel decides that a policy is politically impossible. A Westminster lobby decides that a minister has performed well. A newspaper decides that a wealthy family moving abroad represents a national exodus.

Then each outlet reports the reactions produced by the others.

The assertion becomes coverage. The coverage creates discussion. The discussion is cited as proof that the original assertion mattered.

By the end of the day, journalists are reporting on a national conversation largely conducted among themselves.

That is why “everyone laughed” is such a revealing phrase.

It erases the boundary between the journalist’s social environment and the country outside it. It transforms a room into a nation.

Who gets to explain Britain?

This is ultimately a question of representation.

British institutions have become better at changing the visible characteristics of the people placed before us. There are more women, more Black and Asian faces and more openly LGBT presenters and writers than there were several decades ago.

That matters.

But diversity of appearance is not necessarily diversity of experience.

If everyone attended similar universities, entered through similar professional routes, lives in similar parts of London and circulates within the same political-media network, the institution can look transformed while remaining culturally unchanged.

A privately educated Black presenter is not automatically working class. A female columnist with an Oxford education and family connections does not necessarily understand the life of a woman surviving on Universal Credit. Identity can alter who occupies the chair without altering the class assumptions surrounding it.

Britain congratulates itself for changing the faces while protecting the pipeline.

The result is a media class that can discuss poverty without knowing poor people, discuss trade without understanding trades, discuss migration without speaking to migrants, and discuss public services primarily through press releases and political briefings.

It is not that ordinary experience guarantees wisdom. It does not.

It is that a country cannot understand itself when such a narrow group has been appointed to perform the understanding on everybody else’s behalf.

Journalists should question power. The public should also question journalists.

Who selected them? Who financed their path into the profession? Which institutions opened their doors? Who keeps booking them? What do they earn now? What experience gives them authority beyond being familiar to other members of the media?

And when they tell us that “everyone” is laughing, furious, terrified or demanding action, we should ask the simplest question of all:

Everyone where?