Scoop! Journalists in Fiction

Thinkers, scribblers and cattle

...Let me tell you something. There are three sorts of people - thinkers, scribblers and cattle. It is true I secretly count almost all who are called thinkers and poets among the scribblers, and most of the scribblers belong among the cattle. But that's not the point. The business of thinkers is to search out the truth. There is, however, a secret about truth which, oddly enough, is but little known, although I should have thought it as clear as daylight - and it is this: truth is like the sun, its value depends wholly upon being at a correct distance away from it. If the thinkers were allowed to have everything their own way they would steer our globe straight into the sun and burn us all to ashes. Small wonder, then, their activity sometimes causes the cattle to become restive and bellow: Put out the sun, in the name of Satan, put it out! It's the business of us scribblers to preserve a correct and satisfactory distance from the truth. A really good scribbler - and there aren't many! - understands the thinker and feels with the cattle. It's our job to protect the thinkers from the rage of the cattle and the cattle from too hefty doses of truth. But I admit the latter is the easier of the two and the one we make the best job of in the ordinary way of things.

• Doctor Glas, Hjalmar Soderberg   

A perversion of normal existence

It is hard to conceive of a bleaker portrayal of journalism than that offered by Gordon Burn in Fullalove (1995), a forensic and pitiless examination of the demons of self-loathing that shape Norman Miller, 'a hack, a scribbler' at the 'wall-shinning, nose-poking, leg-in-the-door, end of the trade.'

Reporting is a perversion of normal existence. Even (ex-wife) was forever telling me, "You get to know them so that they feel relaxed with you, ask them the questions you have no natural right to expect answers to, ask to see things you weren't meant to see, they open a window on the most intimate parts of their lives, and then you walk away."

The Inky Path 4

Newsworthiness does not depend on an absolute standard of what is or is not news.

• Quoted from The Inky Path, in Martyn Bedford's Exit: Orange and Red

"Well, it (Molecross's Miscellany of the Mysterious and Misunderstood) doesn't have a large audience. It's esoteric."

• Molecross, in Dr Who: The Algebra of Ice, by Lloyd Rose

A great distraction

"News was a great distraction if you didn't want to think about your own life."

A splendid observation from Jim Kelly's The Water Clock; many more to follow, and thanks to Roger Hermiston for the recommendation.