Journalists are the hypocrites today that the scribes were in Jesus's time
Political columnists are a self-interested and nepotistic elite, writes George Pitcher. No change there then
Back in the day, there was a drinking club in Fleet Street called Scribes. I seem to remember it (patchily) occupying one of the railway arches that straddled Ludgate Hill, alongside other delightful dives such as Mother Bunch’s and Arch 9. No windows, so you never knew whether it was day or night. Sometimes a snooker table. Always cigarette smoke.
Scribes was named somewhat reverentially for its clientele. “Hacks” would have been a more regular term for those of us who plied our trade in the practice of journalism at that time. To be a “scribe” would be altogether more up oneself. A scribe was not a reporter – more likely a columnist, an opinion-former, a “fine writer” (that really was a job description on newspapers).
So it has always been with scribes. Their heritage is rooted in the learned and leading ancient Jews who flourished in their culture between the Babylonian exile in the 5th century BCE and the sacking of Jerusalem by the emperor Titus in 70 CE.
These men (yes, men of course) formed the team with the Pharisees as scriptural copyists, editors and interpreters of the Hebrew Law that censured the insurgent Jesus movement as it gathered influence not just in agrarian Galilee but with increasing momentum in the belly of the beast of Jewish and Roman power in Jerusalem.
The evangelist Matthew, writing principally for his Jewish audience, has the Nazarene deliver Seven Woes on the Scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23), among them:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
These are the privileged pontificaters of their time. The ones who presume to tell others how to live, by virtue of the authority vested in them by their education. They tell the masses how to behave and what is acceptable to think. They are the establishment, attached to temporal power, imbued with self-righteousness and with massive self-interest in the system being maintained in which they enjoy their favoured positions.
Sound familiar? Yes, these are the forebears of today’s columnists and commentators. Today’s journalism is dominated by a self-entitled, white, middle-class, well educated and predominantly male elite that is self-preserving and self-perpetuating. And the characteristic which this elite holds most in common with the scribes of old, as it lectures those less blessed than itself on how to conduct their lives, is hypocrisy: The self-granted right to point to the motes in our eyes while apparently oblivious to the beams in their own.
Fawning pipsqueaks
On the political right wing, they hope that some of the wealth and luxury of the rich and powerful that they assiduously support will rub off on them by association. I don’t mean proper conservative columnists here, such as Charles (now Lord) Moore or (Professor) Simon Heffer. I refer to the fawning pipsqueaks of right-wing journalism, ingratiating themselves with their moneyed demi-gods, like snobby suburbanites at a gin-n-jag golf club. I’m tempted to say that they know who they are, but self-awareness isn’t a quality they cultivate, as the horrors it would harvest would be too debilitating.
On the left, they coextend an austere puritanism, a kind of academic snobbery that in its rarefied intellectualism and casual wit gets Oxbridge a bad name. They despise the wealth of trade but decline to eschew its riches and privileges for themselves. To call them Champagne Socialists is to miss the point – they are downwardly mobile only in so far as they are craft-beer swilling capitalists.
They tell the lower orders what’s good for them before joining their friends – the only people they ever meet – at artisan restaurants or at their chateaus in France. Again, we’re not talking about Rafael Behr or Marina Hyde here, but the sanctimonious sect of the leftist Commentariat - they are the pre-levelled, which is why they disdain the conservative concept of levelling up.
Privilege through bloodline
But perhaps the most repellent aspect of these journalistic tribes, polarised by social media while sharing so much in common, is the protection of their privilege through bloodline. Anyone with a passing acquaintance of the practice of print journalism will recognise the dynastic surnames in by-lines. No surprise really when you have to be able to afford to live in London to break into mainstream journalism, with its almost Freemasonic clique of unpaid internships and cost-free Islington flat-shares.
All these people bewail the demise of good journalism, without for a moment considering that they are its terminal disease. As the iconoclastic observer Julie Burchill puts it: “Nepotism is eating journalism alive – and thus hastening the decline of newspapers.”
They seek to preserve their hegemony just as did those who wished to preserve the power of the Temple in first-century Jerusalem. We may have no media messiah to cast them out, but they must be resisted, if there is not one stone of journalism to be left on another when a reckoning comes.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest