Summary
Overview
This Private Eye podcast brings together Ian Hislop, Helen Lewis, and Adam Macqueen for a summer special about the best books on journalism ever written. Each host recommends two books, ranging from classic reportage collections and satirical novels to sobering accounts of genocide and the glory days of British tabloids. The discussion explores journalism's evolution from Fleet Street's golden age to today's digital landscape, examining both the craft's nobility and its excesses.
The Power of Eyewitness Reportage
Ian Hislop opens with the Faber Book of Reportage, a comprehensive collection spanning from ancient Greece to modern times. He emphasizes how editor John Carey framed reportage as preventing people from escaping reality and educating their sympathies. The discussion touches on journalism's core mission: being present and reporting what actually happened rather than offering mere opinion.
- The Faber Book of Reportage covers eyewitness accounts from 200 BC to present day, including Thucydides and accounts of the Titanic
- Carey argues that with the end of religion as shared narrative, current events have become what people share
- Reportage prevents escape from reality and limits capacity for the inhuman
- The value lies in genuine curiosity about the world rather than personal takes or feelings
" It changes its readers, it educates their sympathies, and it limits their capacity for the inhuman. "
100 Years of British Tabloids
Adam Macqueen discusses Matthew Engel's Tickle the Public, which chronicles a century of popular press history. Published in 1996 at the height of tabloid power, the book reveals how dramatically the media landscape has transformed. Engel's thesis traces how newspapers succeeded by undercutting competition while lowering reader expectations, offering fascinating historical details like the Mirror dinghy giveaway.
- The book's thesis: newspapers succeed by going cheaper and lowering audience expectations
- The Mirror dinghy was actually produced by the Daily Mirror in 1962 as an affordable kit for £63.11
- Newspapers gave away leather-bound sets of Dickens in the 1930s as circulation boosters
- Press barons like Lord Northcliffe, Beaverbrook, and Cecil King wielded enormous unaccountable power
" The wanting power without responsibility the prerogative of the harlot through the ages but it exactly the same as the tech bros these days as your Zuckerbergs and your Elon Musks "
" Lord Northcliffe ends up going spectacularly mad and thinks he's been poisoned by belgian ice cream "
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