People love to hate the journalist’, wrote Lynda Ghiglione in 1990, identifying one strand of a long-standing cultural schizophrenia in public attitudes to the modern day heirs of Edmund Burke's Fourth Estate. The journalist is a hate figure, on the one hand, held responsible by many for the debasement of public discourse and the coarsening of society in general. The journalist is commonly referred to in these contexts as a hack, a reptile, a sleaze merchant revelling in other's miseries, a purveyor of cultural trash. The outspoken Tory MP and diarist, the late Alan Clark, typified this attitude when he wrote that journalists are ‘fellows with, in the main, squalid and unfulfilling private lives, insecure in their careers, and suffering a considerable degree of dependence on alcohol and narcotics’.

Clark was not alone in such thoughts (nor is the journalist alone in harbouring such vices, let us concede at the outset). His comments come from an essay included in a volume entitled Secrets of the Press: journalists on journalism. Clark reminds us that much of the loathing expressed for journalists is actually a form of self-loathing. Journalists often hate themselves, it seems, just as much as non-journalists do. In the scabrous words of one of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century, Hunter S. Thompson: