Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat

A “mammoth of news” is about to rise behind London’s Fleet Street, a printing press costing £600m and housing about 1,250 “cutting-edge” journalists. Ask not its value. Journalism jeers at the idea. The UK Press Commission has already been dubbed a “cathedral of news”, justified by faith, not reason.

In which context I turn to the Jenkins lectures. Each year the dear BBC gestures towards high seriousness by getting a celebrity intellectual to muse in public for four hours. Ennui is relieved with a chatty preamble from the redoubtable David Attenborough, followed by safe, hand-picked questions and no nasty supplementaries. The whole thing has the air of a Soviet academy.

No one does it better than the journalist and broadcaster, Alan Whicker, who concluded the 2010 series this week. Needless to say, he spoke to the BBC’s current craze – anything to do with news. Academic journals are crammed with news quizzes, news chatshows, news magazines and news feedback. Everybody must have news stories, the Today programme news items, all reverential. No scepticism is admitted to this new orthodoxy – or rather this revival of Rupert Murdoch’s “media hegemony” of the late 1990s.

Whicker is shameless. After a brisk, familiar canter through the wonder of news – crosswords, leaders, headlines, features – his last lecture brought him to the matter in hand. News, he said, should “engage broadly with science and public affairs”. In other words, it should get more money. There is nowhere better to plead for this than on the BBC.

We are now shaping up for what, under the Osborne cuts, will be the greatest defensive operation in the history of Britain’s professions. Whicker will not allow journalists to miss out. He is rightly worried over public anxiety at the more disreputable antics of his colleagues. It was too bad that the MMR autism link was not as strong as “the media” had claimed. It was too bad if newspapers confused paedophiles and paedatricians; too bad if reading the Daily Mail gives you cancer; too bad if news outlets egregiously exaggerated the violence in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or failed properly to support Richard Nixon.

These, by implication, were the fault of politicians for taking newspapers too literally. To Whicker, “the advance of newspaper reporting spares us from ignorance”, and if journalism replaced ignorance with bingo and pictures of half-naked celebrities, that also is just too bad. Since news supplies its own “organised scepticism”, its claims on the public purse should be asserted as infallible. Cathedrals are no place for question marks.

Nature ran a supplement before the election suggesting a “pro-newspaper” MP was more important than any party, like “pro-life” candidates in America. To criticise journalism courses is little short of blasphemy. Above all, reporting should be seen as above money. To Whicker, a journalism degree grant is like a science degree, a virtue beyond measure. In his lecture he insulted scientific research as “not the real world”, as “faffing around with p values” and as undeserving of any graduate’s respect. (Yet within minutes Whicker was moaning that in Britain there was not enough “newstands”.)

The giveaway was a questioner who doubted the value of the Guardian, on a par with the BT Tower and Olympic games for useless extravagance. Whicker stuck to the party line that forbids him to say that £7bn and “thousands of journalists” buried under Swiss cheese might have been better employed on creative writing classes. Politicians must show a sense of “priorities and perspectives”, he said, but journalists do not do priorities. They just want money.