Recommend A Good Journalist.

Turtwig

Alright that is fuggin it I've had my faith torn out me by all these shoddily written journalist pieces and their authors. So folks please provide names and references to actual quality journalist work in this thread that is worthy of merit and praise.

Oh and if you are insulted by the fact that I think most journalists are utter twats who couldn't follow logic if it was freely flowing from their arse then you really ought to read the mainstream newspaper and tabloid, on well, just about anything. Thank **** for skeptics!

Let's have give merit to those who actually deserve it.

• Ben Goldacre
• Peter Hadfield.

robindch

Malty_T wrote: »

actual quality journalist work

In rough chronological order and off the top of my head:

James Cameron - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron_%28journalist%29
Martha Gellhorn - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn
William L. Shirer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Shirer
Alistair Cooke - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistair_Cooke

And many others, most of them working (or worked) for the BBC - Allan Little, John Simpson, Lyse Doucet, Kevin Connolly, Matt Frei, Angus Roxburgh.

If you want to pick one, it's gotta be Martha Gellhorn.

Turtwig

robindch wrote: »

If you want to pick one, it's gotta be Martha Gellhorn.

I knew you would mention her. After alll, you did provide me in my nooby days here with what has now become one of my favourite quotes of all time.

When I was young I believed in the perfectibility of man, and in progress, and thought of journalism as a guiding light. If people were told the truth, if dishonor and injustice were clearly shown to them, they would at once demand the saving action, punishment of wrong-doers, and care for the innocent. How people were to accomplish these reforms, I did not know. That was their job. A journalist's job was to bring the news, to be the eyes for their conscience. I think I must have imagined public opinion as a solid force, something like a tornado, always ready to blow on the side of the angels.

During the years of my energetic hope, I blamed the leaders when history regularly went wrong, when cruelty and violence were tolerated or abetted, and the innocent never got anything except the dirty end of the stick. [...]

It took nine years, and a Great Depression and two wars ending in defeat, and one surrender without war, to break my faith in the benign power of the press. Gradually, I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit. (There were also liars in my trade, and leaders have always used facts as relative and malleable. The supply of lies was unlimited.) Good people, those who opposed evil whenever they saw it, never increased beyond a gallant minority. The manipulated millions could be aroused or soothed by any lies. The guiding light of journalism was no stronger than a glow worm.

I belong to a Federation of Cassandras, my colleagues the foreign correspondents, whom I met at every disaster. They had been reporting the rise of Fascism, its horrors and its sure menace, for years. The doom they had long prophesied arrived on time, bit by bit, as scheduled. In the end we became solitary stretcher-bearers, trying to pull individuals free from the wreckage. If a life could be saved from the first of the Gestapo in Prague, or another from behind the barbed wire on the sands at Arlegès, that was a comfort but it was hardly journalism. Drag, scheming, bullying and dollars occasionally preserved one human being at a time.

For all the good our articles did, they might have been written in invisible ink, printed on leaves and loosed to the wind.

DarylH

No one said Paul Williams?