Author: Ophelia Benson

But then, the person who wrote that article concluded it with this bit of wisdom by way of her nomination for the 100 Worst Books list:

To kick off, mine is Wuthering Heights – it has all the emotional depth of sixth-form poetry and I feel an intense desire to give all the characters a good slap and tell them to stop being so self-indulgent. Mysteriously, it’s considered a landmark of English literature by many people whose judgment I usually admire.

So clearly I shouldn’t be surprised if she uses words in a silly way. In fact I should be surprised that she’s writing for a major newspaper, that’s what I should be surprised at.

All right. Clearly one of these days I’m just going to have to drop everything and make a real effort to figure out what in hell people are talking about when they call someone or something ‘elitist.’ I’ve said it before but I’m afraid I’m just going to have to say it again, and no doubt I’ll have to say it many more times in the future, because it just keeps on happening – people use it for anything and everything! Snob, clever clogs, intellectual, nerd, bookish person, someone who thinks some things are better than other things, conceited person, anything and everything within a fifty mile radius of either Cambridge or Oxford, quiche-eater, in the UK. In the US the word makes even less sense. It means everyone to the left of Rush Limbaugh, anyone who thinks the 43d president might possibly be wrong about anything, anyone who favours a progressive tax system, anyone who isn’t passionately fond of Sport Utility Vehicles. Put the two ‘definitions’ together and you have total incoherence.

Consider this comment from a Guardian article about the BBC’s 100 favourite books list, for example.

The same format would not have worked with books, because it would have carried such undertones of elitism. The BBC could have asked people to nominate the 100 ‘best’ books – contemporary and classic works of literature that stand out for their fine writing, profound explorations of the human condition and their impact on the direction of world literature. But it probably would have received less than one-tenth of the votes, excluded most children and produced a very different Top 100 which would have looked more like an English undergraduate’s reading list and would have been of interest only to the very small number of people who regularly tune in to book programmes.

How does the writer know that’s how people would have defined the ‘best’ books? But more to the point, why would it have carried overtones of elitism? What does that even mean? That only the very rich read the best books? That only upper class twits do? Only the royal family does (now there’s a joke)? Why is it ‘elitist’ to read what someone might possibly consider the ‘best’ books? When did elite stop meaning the rich and powerful who run everything and start meaning educated and/or intellectual people? And why does no one seem to realise how idiotic that is? How it simultaneously ignores the real sources of inequality and unfair influence, and denigrates what ought to be accessible to everyone and a source of curiosity, joy, excitement, and adventure for everyone?

But answer came there none. I’ll just have to keep asking.

The Jayson Blair saga continues. There is a staggeringly bizarre interview with him in the New York Observer today. It’s interesting (to me anyway) that he chooses the same sentence from the long Times article on him that I remarked on the other day.

In The Times’ lengthy May 11 account of Mr. Blair’s long trail of deception, it reported that “the porch overlooks no such thing.” Mr. Blair found this funny. “The description was just so far off from reality,” he said. “The way they described it in The Times story—someone read a portion of it for me. I just couldn’t stop laughing.”

We must have noticed the same thing, or perhaps different angles on the same thing. The hint of emotion in that phrase – ‘the porch overlooks no such thing.’ It is such a giveaway, isn’t it. I could tell the reporters were angry, and no doubt Blair could tell that and a great deal besides. So he laughed and laughed…

But in truth Blair is not the only odd thing about this article. The reporter – the one reporting on the reporter – says some fairly peculiar things too. This, for instance:

Why had a promising 27-year-old reporter with a career in high gear at the most respected news organization in the world thrown it all away in a pathological binge of dishonesty?

I’ve read and heard that characterization of the New York Times many times since the Blair story broke. The most respected news organization in the world? Really? Are you quite sure about that? Is it just barely possible that that’s a somewhat parochial and unexamined view of the matter? Is it conceivable that there are one or two other fairly good news organizations somewhere else on the planet? Is it also possible that the New York Times is in fact not all that good in any case? That its reputation is a good deal larger than its merit? That we’ve (we in the US that is) been hypnotized by that reputation into simply assuming that it’s the best not only newspaper but ‘news organization’ in the world? Or that other local newspapers in the US are so bad that the Times in comparison seems like a miraculous shining star? Whatever the explanation, I would submit that the BBC, for example, is rather well thought-of, and that there may be one or two German or French or Australian or Canadian newspapers that aren’t dramatically worse than the New York Times.

And then there’s this:

He was one of those rare people who seemed preordained to be a journalist—a reporter suffused with a kinetic combination of charm, drive and ambition that compelled his co-workers, even in the wake of his scandal, to describe him as “talented.”

Those are the attributes that mark someone out as a preordained journalist? Charm, drive and ambition? Not intelligence, curiosity, dedication, verbal ability, observation? Charm? Charm? What is this, high school? A popularity contest? A presidential election? What’s charm got to do with anything? Journalists are supposed to find out what the truth about a given subject is and then write about it, aren’t they? They’re not supposed to flash a cute smile around the room while they make up the story out of their own adorable heads. No thanks; keep the charm and give us accuracy, attention, evidence, reliable sources, fact-checking, and other charmless staples of good journalism.