The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
Carl Bernstein
This week I had the pleasure of reading Scoop, a book written in 1938 by the English author Evelyn Waugh. The book took me on an exciting journey through the musings of Fleet Street in the 1930s, the home of British national newspapers until the 1980s. In typical Waugh style, the novel ridicules journalistic endeavours in the most humorous manner imaginable. It seems pertinent to have finished reading Scoop this week having watched Brian Williams’s career deteriorate precipitously into almost non-existence. For those of you unaware, Brian Williams is (or was) a news anchor for NBC whose fabricated story about a life and death escape in Iraq has made international headlines over the last few days. Contemporary examples of Scoop’s characters facilitated my understanding of the goings-on at Fleet Street. Lord Copper effortlessly mutates into Rupert Murdoch, Corker transforms into Brian Williams, with William Boot becoming any of the thousands of journalists waiting anxiously for their big break. These metamorphoses empowered me to become knowledgeable in understanding how Scoop’s characters were portrayed and perceived by persons of that time period.
Scoop centres around a young writer whose bucolic life in rural England is abruptly interrupted, after being shipped off abroad to cover a civil war in Africa. Lord Copper, owner of the Daily Beast, in a case of mistaken identity, sends the wrong man for the job. William, a nature columnist for the paper is inexperienced and rather clueless about the journalistic endeavours necessary to succeed in such a cutthroat industry. However, Waugh satirically explores the daily undertakings of a foreign correspondent. After arriving, William – along with countless other journalists from France, Switzerland, Germany, and America – find no discernible war, so they simply go about inventing a conflict to please their tabloid masters back home. From misinformation to completely fabricated events, the journalists behave more like fiction writers than news correspondents, a misperception skilfully conveyed to the reader.
As mentioned before, the bulk of the novel takes place in fictional Ishmaelia, a country we might associate with Ethiopia today. Waugh himself departed for Abyssinia in 1930, representing several English newspapers, to cover the coronation of Halle Selassie. He reported the event as “an elaborate propaganda effort” to convince the world that Abyssinia was a civilised nation. This, of course, was untrue as Selassie triumphed over his adversaries using the most barbaric and inhuman means imaginable. Similar to those in Scoop, journalists and News Corporations continue to manipulate and distort stories to widen their publicity and increase ratings. Through a series of hilarious fumbles and bewildering encounters, William manages to pick up the scoop of the year, steering him towards prominence amongst his colleagues.
The fictional journalists in Scoop are bambi-like compared to those who have made international headlines (for all the wrong reasons) in the last decade. Police bribery, the hacking of personal information, and the unlawful tactics used to pursue a story have become commonplace among journalists today. The defunct News of the World has led the facade in such malpractice until its closure in 2011. Hacking a dead girl’s phone was to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, an unearthing that resulted in the resignation of senior News of the World employees and several high-ranking officers of the Metropolitan Police Service. A direct, although less sinister, correlation can be made with these shocking transgressions and various incidents in Waugh’s novel. The corruption that greases the wheels of society is effortlessly illustrated in Scoop. William’s first assignment for the Daily Beast is to report on a story involving the Minister for Defence’s wife driving her car into a male public lavatory. On trying to access the scene, William is stopped by a policeman.
“Press”, William tells him. “I’m on the Beast”.“So am I”, the sergeant replies. “Go to it”.
This rather amusing dialogue extracts a giggle from the reader but is pervaded by unsolicited truths about newspaper associates. A more recent story is that of a freelance journalist, Ian Bailey who had been falsely accused of murdering a French national at her holiday home in West Cork. Bailey became a suspect in the murder while reporting on the case for the Sunday Tribune newspaper. Although acquitted of any wrong-doing, Bailey supposedly told the news editor of the paper: “It was me, I did it, I killed her to resurrect my career”. Such frightening remarks propel us to think of how far one would go to succeed in his/her career. The 1996 editor of the Sunday Tribune told the court of her shock at the time of the murder: “probably the single biggest fiasco I had ever encountered, that the reporter I had on a story was in fact the suspect”. This remark is more fitting to the character of a fictional crime thriller than that of an actual newspaper editor. In Scoop, no journalist is killed to acquire a story, but all other opportunities are seized upon, such was the extent to which a journalist desired to report a big scoop.
Christopher Hitchens’ refers to Scoop as a “novel of pitiless realism: the mirror of satire held up to the catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has done…”. Although I have mused over the parallels one can deduce from Scoop and present-day journalism, the narrative complies with Waugh’s usual satirical panache. Eloquent dialogue assisted by genteel jargon magnifies the characters’ attraction to the reader. A close aide memoire of a P.G Wodehouse novel, with all its flippancy and joviality combined.
Mr. Salter’s side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent. When Lord Copper was right he said, “Definitely, Lord Copper”; when he was wrong, “Up to a point.””Let me see, what’s the name of the place I mean? Capital of Japan? Yokohama, isn’t it?””Up to a point, Lord Copper.””And Hong Kong belongs to us, doesn’t it?””Definitely, Lord Copper.”
The above excerpt from Scoop is a hilarious example of Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek approach to the hierarchal inequity present in Fleet Street society. This is a little taster of what to expect from the rest of the novel. If you are searching for a better understanding about the workings of journalism, and want to laugh while doing so, I recommend you read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. “I am Tim Collins, reporting from behind my desk. Thank you for reading, Goodnight and God bless”.
Works Cited
Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop. London: Peguin, 2012. Book.
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