Anorak

Anorak News | Having Your Cake And Eating It: The Guardian’s Hereditary Journalists

Having Your Cake And Eating It: The Guardian’s Hereditary Journalists

by | 24th, September 2014

WRITING in the Guardian, Nick Cohen writes:

Politics, journalism, the arts – they are all increasingly controlled by nice people from wealthy backgrounds. And their niceness is strangling us…

Lindsey Macmillan of the Institute of Education found that journalists used to come from families 6% better off than average, whereas now they come from homes that are 42% richer. Indeed, British journalists, the supposed tribunes of the people, now hail from wealthier backgrounds than, er, bankers, an awkward fact that ought to cause embarrassment all round. I look at my younger self today and wonder if he could become a journalist on a serious newspaper. My parents were teachers. They were comfortably off by the standards of 1980s Manchester, but they could never have afforded to rent me rooms in London and cover my expenses while I went from internship to internship. They had to look after my sisters as much as anything else.

Cohen’s columns appear on the paper’s Comment is Free pages. You can access them for free.

Comment is Free Community Co-ordinator is Bella Mackie – aka Bella Rudbridger, daughter to – get this – Alan Rusbridger and Guardian journalist Lindsay Makie.

You really cannot make this stuff up. It gets better when you read what the sages have to say about nepotism (they’re against it).

@shanerichmond notes on Twitter:

“Nice bit of satire in the Observer, placing Nick Cohen’s column about arts and media nepotism opposite a column by Victoria Coren Mitchell.”

Alan Coren  her dad, was a Times’ columnist.

 



Posted: 24th, September 2014 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink