Grub Street

Maybe it is not quite so apparent when you read an individual dead tree newspaper, but if you – as I do – visit the main broadsheet (as they used to be) newspaper websites on a daily basis you do tend to get a picture of the journalists – especially the columnists - as being all alike. This is despite the claimed, or assumed, political leanings of the papers they write for. So this comes as no surprise where:

the social exclusivity of journalism seems certain to become still more common. "Walk through our corridors," a lecturer at one university journalism school told me, "and you will hear that homogeneous public school accent." According to a sample analysis carried out for the Guardian, nearly half the postgraduate students in City University's journalism school, still one of the main gateways to Fleet Street and the BBC, come from just four universities: Oxford, Bristol, Leeds and Cambridge. All four are among the elite which recruit higher than average numbers of students from middle-class homes and fee-charging schools.

Nearly all the columnists for the broadsheets seem to live in the same London metropolitan area, be frightfully middle-class and to share the same outlook on the world that transcends their political posturing – whether of the nominal right or left – in their concerns. It seems to echo the same narrowness that we now get in the political parties with the rise of the professional politicians, people who have had no real experience of life outside the metropolitan middle-class enclaves they were born, brought-up and remain within.

*Grub Street