2018-11-03 The Spectator

(Jacob Rumans) #1
Fraser Nelson says he made it clear
some years ago that this publication
will not accept or attend these awards —
though that didn’t stop him accepting one
himself in 2009. I would mock him for his
hypocrisy, except that to my shame, I suc-
cumbed too. About a decade ago I found
myself at a table where I was expected to
make conversation with assorted PR types.
We had nothing to say to each other. If the
man from Barclays had tipped me off about
the Libor rigging scandal, then under way,
or the woman from Vodafone had given me
a steer on how it had cut its UK tax bill, the
evening would have gone with a swing.
Unfortunately, whistleblowers are the
last people journalists are likely to meet.

I speak from experience when I say the
event is the corporate equivalent of com-
munity singing; a happy, clappy, back- slappy
smugfest where not one discordant voice
suggests that journalists and lobbyists are
not all in this together, and might have fun-
damentally diverging interests. Forewarned
is forearmed, and I simply ignored the invi-
tation when I was nominated last year. My
— I hope — impressively Olympian indif-
ference was a mistake. Violent public denun-
ciations are the way ahead.
In 2014, the Observer’s restaurant crit-
ic Jay Rayner demanded that his name be
taken off the food and drink shortlist because
Tesco sponsored it. In his old-fashioned way,
he did not believe that self-respecting jour-

nalists should be collecting gongs from the
people they are paid to scrutinise. ‘I could in
no way accept any sort of award sponsored
by one of the biggest supermarket compa-
nies,’ he told me. ‘It was crass in the extreme,
but then Hobsbawm really is. She goes on
about the power of networking, without
clocking the conflicts that can cause.’
This year’s judges include such noted
literary stylists and exposers of corruption
as Dami Fajobi, head of client services at
Slenky, the chief lobbyists from Vodafone
and Fidelity International, and Patricia
Hamzahee from something called ‘Integriti
Capital’.
Two of the finalists they were meant to
judge, the Guardian’s Gary Younge and
Nesrine Malik, demanded their names be
taken off the shortlist for the social diver-
sity category on the grounds that they had
been nominated alongside Melanie Phillips,
a purveyor of allegedly ‘offensive attacks on
immigrants in general and Muslims in par-
ticular’. Whether Phillips responds in kind
remains to be seen.
In a novel twist, one of this year’s judges
has walked out with them. A Lib Dem activ-
ist with the unimprovable name of Helen
Belcher denounced Janice Turner of the
Times for having the audacity to write about
the opportunities for rapists and child abus-
ers that the policy of allowing men to iden-
tify as women brought. Turner was, Belcher
libellously implied, somehow responsible
for trans suicides. Belcher resigned when her
fellow judges did not take the cue and dis-
qualify Turner as a ‘Terf’, the modern equiv-
alent of a witch.
The awards are a sign of an age when
PRs working in the UK outnumber journal-
ists by a large margin. Most of the students
who spend thousands on postgraduate jour-
nalism courses will not get jobs in Britain’s
declining news business — as the colleges
who take their money must know. They will
end up in PR, where the supposedly leftish
education they received on a media stud-
ies BA will prove remarkably useful to the
bureaucracies that own their souls. A smat-
tering of Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard
here, a little deconstruction there, and the
21st-century graduate is ready to believe
there is no such thing as objective truth and
feel justified in telling whatever lie their
employers want them to utter.
There are, I accept, newspapers that
function as little more than PR departments
for their proprietors’ prejudices. But even if
you absent them from the equation, the bal-
ance of power between those who expose
and those who conceal is dangerously tilt-
ed. And as newspapers get weaker, the bal-
ance will be tilted to a tipping point. There
are many reasons for journalists to refuse
to participate in the Comment Awards. The
best is this: Hobsbawm and her corporate
sponsors are not praising journalists, but
inviting them to their own funeral.

S


hortly before his death, the Marxist
historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that
capitalism crushed the integrity of art-
ists and intellectuals. Assessed only in terms
of their commercial appeal, they became ‘a
sub-department of marketing’. In a touch-
ing display of filial loyalty, Julia Hobsbawm
seems to be proving her old dad right.
The former head of New Labour’s favour-
ite PR agency, Hobsbawm Macaulay, now
runs an outfit called Editorial Intelligence, ‘a
tool for ... bringing together key journalists
and PR professionals through networking
clubs’. Journalists once had a vague notion
that their job was to tell the truth whatever
the cost, while PRs believed they must pro-
tect their institution whatever the cost. There
was a natural antipathy between them, which
Hobsbawm has sought to break down under
the guise of ‘networking’. For a mere £1,
a year (£3,000 for corporate membership),
marketing managers, PR execs, brand pro-
moters, lobbyists, and people who can never
explain what they do but insist on doing it
anyway, can ‘create and build your personal
and professional network... not with algo-
rithms but with real people, face-to-face, and
real human intelligence’.
The question remained: how could Hob-
sbawm persuade journalists and academics
to give ‘face time’ to such an unappealing
crew? Surely, they would run a mile. Hobs-
bawm enlists a good many of them to speak
at her annual Names Not Numbers confer-
ence in Oxford, described by Niall Ferguson
as ‘like Davos ... with community singing’.
This makes it sounds like hell on earth, but
I imagine large cheques ease the suffering.
Her main inducement, however, is to play on
journalists’ most glaring vice: not greed, but
vanity. A hunger for awards.
Hobsbawm’s annual Comment Awards
for pundits and columnists will be held
this year at ‘our lead partner, Edwardian
Hotels, at their beautiful May Fair Hotel in
Mayfair’. It is a cleverly constructed trap.
Journalists don’t enter their work. Nor do
their editors. Instead, the judges announce
a shortlist — and dare pundits to refuse to
play along. They invariably end up parad-
ing in front of the assembled lobbyists, like
performing seals waiting to be thrown a fish.

How to trap a journalist


Hacks love winning awards – and lobbyists know it


NICK COHEN


The Comment Awards is the
corporate equivalent of community
singing; a happy clappy smugfest

‘Is this the real life? Or is it just fantasy?’
Free download pdf