Journalists - formerly grubby hacks ready to have a go at the privileged - are themselves increasingly recruited from the upper echelons, says Batya Ungar-Sargon in this interview with Russell Brand:
They have evolved, she says, from ‘a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers.’
The working class is not only devocalised in the Press but disempowered in Parliament, where there has been a decline in working-class MPs, leading to a more right-wing attitude to welfare, according to a UCL study in 2018.
Ironically, this suppression is driving the proletariat into the arms of right-wing extremists, according to Jack Buckby’s book ‘Monster of their own making’, as discussed here by ‘Demirep’:
This then gives the ruling elite the opportunity to dismiss all such protest as right-wing. As Demirep says, ‘the mainstream media never gives the working-class point of view about anything.’
One could probably do a series on posh journos. Let’s take a few and see how their personal privilege is being translated into media influence and in some cases even intermarriage with the Top People.
Greg Dyke, then Director-General of the BBC, said in 2001 that the management structure was ‘hideously [98%] white.’ In that year’s census for England and Wales 87.4% of respondents described themselves as White British, so there was something of a racial imbalance if you go by quotas; but ‘hideously’?
Mr Dyke attended Hayes Grammar School and as a mature student in 1971 went to the University of York at a time when only 6% of school-leavers took up a degree course.
Jon Snow, Channel 4 News presenter (1989-2021), is the son of a public school headmaster who later became Bishop of Whitby. Jon attended prep school and public school, going on to Liverpool University (which expelled him in 1970 for his part in a socialist student protest).
His principles do him credit (in some people’s eyes), but also led him (in my view) to over-familiarity with powerful people of his own political persuasion:
On 27 June 2003, at the height of the row between the BBC and Downing Street over the ‘sexed-up’ briefing that served as a pretext for UK involvement in the invasion of Iraq, Snow allowed Alastair Campell, then Tony Blair’s director of communications, to march in uninvited and take over the programme, giving his denials in seeming rage and indignation, drilling the messages into the newsman's desk with his long and bony finger and interrupting Snow with a raised palm as the latter (or a Paxman) might do to a lesser interviewee.
Here is the clip, but it cuts the dramatic entrance and also the end, when Snow gave him (what I saw as) a grateful, fraternal handshake at the conclusion of the interview. I thought then, ‘They’re all in it together’:
Campbell himself attended grammar school and went to Cambridge University in 1975. His wife, Fiona Millar, also a journalist and former adviser to Blair’s wife Cherie, attended Camden School for Girls (when it was still a grammar school, though her Wikipedia entry glosses over that point); then University College London.
Peter Snow (Newsnight presenter 1980-1997) is a cousin of Jon Snow (above), and the grandson of a WWI general. His TV presenter and popular historian son Dan (educated at public school - St Paul’s - and Oxford) married the daughter of Britain’s richest landowner, the Duke of Westminster in 2010.
Speaking of marriage, another feature of this rising class of the privileged commentariat is an aristocratic disregard of conventionality.
For example, it was only after 41 years of living together that Alastair Campbell and Fiona Millar chose to wed. Even then, the ceremony they chose was a civil partnership because they were ‘opposed to the religious and patriarchal associations of weddings.’
That may be good as political virtue-signalling, but it doesn’t seem like good professional journalism. Surely they knew that a civil ceremony has been available in England and Wales since 1837; so firmly secular that the register office won’t allow any religious music to be played.
If that wasn’t good enough, then some years ago, since both are proud of their Scottish heritage, they could have gone north for an irregular Caledonian ‘marriage by cohabitation with habit and repute,’ which was legally recognised up to 2006. In Scotland,
‘consent alone made marriage… The law of Scotland did not require the presence of a priest, nor the intervention of any religious ceremony. The law of Scotland considered marriage to be a civil contract, but it did not provide any particular mode by which that contract was to be proved.’
But that wasn’t the point in this case, was it? Ostensibly, what really counted was woke posturing.
For the modern Labour Party, what also mattered was the importance of pulling up the ladder after oneself, to maintain class distinction. and keep the proles seething in their pit so they would continue to validate the leadership of their ‘socialist’ officer class. Remember that in 1965 Labour’s Education Minister Anthony Crosland (public school and Oxford) told his wife:
‘If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales, and Northern Ireland.’
Meanwhile, the working classes continue to decay; and protest, and be sneered at and beaten down when they do.