There’s an art, good reader, to reading a column. Probably makes the reading more fun. It’s like the art of listening to a talk show, but less stark.
Talk shows can be dire, with no guest in the studio and no lights on the phone panel. You hear the panic in the host’s voice, picturing them whizzing through headlines as they speak, clutching every straw - “or perhaps you would like to talk about southern Sudan, or possibly the two-headed dog found in Chongqing, China” When they get to exhorting you to “keep on sending in those SMSes” that they aren’t exactly reading out that’s about as far down as you get.
In a column, the paranoia is past tense and a tad less conspicuous. But there are telltale signs, like the culprit going into a column about columnising.
From there, they duck into random scraps of nothingness. They might have been jammed behind a car called “AI TOG”, and found that jestful smack of buyer’s remorse - officially translated as “OH DEAR”, though I think the Afrikaans has more zing - to be a refreshing antidote to the generally pompous flavour of custom number-plates.
Your lost columnist might add that AI TOG held a civil discussion with a young woman robot-beggar, apparently on lines like “I’m not giving you money today, but I recognise and greet you as a human being”, leaving a delighted beam on the woman’s face despite no exchange of currency.
From there, scratching could turn up a note of sociopolitical gloom, like recording that a nation’s chief of police being disgraced is quite a blot. When you have three in a row and a fourth in the run-up, your government should be looking for the dunce’s chair.
That has brought things more than halfway up to word-count, so with relief, Desperate Columniser starts winding down and latches onto some kind of disloyal revelation of media tricks.
He may irritatingly mention a great game that is shared among a small club - detecting who writes leaders.
A “leader” (often confused with the “lead”, the main article on the front page) is the editor’s opinion stated in dignity and impeccable grammar under the logo on the top left of a left-hand page, soon after the middle.
The leader is not necessarily - in fact not often - written by the editor personally, but by one of a group of leader-writers who love the job not least for its anonymity, which makes writing so much easier.
A fringe attraction is the guessing game, mainly but not entirely among members of the trade.
For decades of freelance leader-writing I had a reader, who I never met, phoning periodically to bet I had written this leader or that. If he guessed right, it made his day. It made my day that he even tried.
I leave you with a recommendation of a basic way to view media tribulations.
When their author, of whatever rank in whatever medium, genuinely asks “What do I do now, according to my own limited lights, to give my putative reader the best service I can?” he or she gets a pass mark, in my book.
I’ll respect that attempt even when that author’s lights say things far from what mine say.
When their aim changes to plain space-filling or preening egos or pushing private wars or sharing in-jokes with in-people, or pictures of themselves at cocktail parties, that’s an F.
Lost as may be, media people who do all they can to best fill their space with something they believe will draw someone out there to returning can at least look in the mirror.
* Beckett is a writer and journalist
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.