“Because it can’t be easy being a tabloid hack at the best of times. Sure, there’s the camaraderie, the sense of power, the rush of skulduggery, the thrill of feeling like one of the chosen few who can see through the Matrix but these are illusory compensations, sweatily constructed by your quaking, sobbing psyche in a bid to counterweigh the cavernous downside: the awful knowledge that you’re wasting your life actively making the world worse.
Chances are you’re quite smart. And you probably love to write – or did, once, back then, before . . . before the fall. Now you’re writing nothing but NYAHH NYAHH NYAHH ad nauseum. You use the only brain you’ll ever have to puke out endless gutfuls of cheap gossip or crude propaganda. Half the time you’re wrecking lives and the other half you’re filling your readers’ heads with nakedly misleading straw- man fairytales. Every now and then something might come along to temporarily justify your existence: a political scoop; a genuine outrage . . . but do you build on it? No. You retreat to the warm cave of your celebrity chef shag-shocks and your tragic tot death- porn double-pagers: wasting your life actively making the world worse.
I suppose the best way to cope with the dull, constant, pulsing awareness that you’re wasting your life actively making the world worse is to somehow bewitch yourself into believing you’re actively making the world better. That by writing about a footballer’s bedroom exploits you’re fearlessly exposing the ugly truth behind the wholesome public image and blah blah role model blah blah fans’ hard-earned cash blah blah sanctimony blah. Hey – whatever works for you, yeah? Dress as a priest if it helps. We all know you’re just grubbily recounting a sex act for our fleeting amusement, like a radio commentator describing two pigs rutting in a sty.”
The Real Victims Of The Phone Hacking Scandal Are The Tabloid Hacks (Charlie Brooker, The Guardian)