This really is the last word from me

EVEN in an age when we read much of our news on a screen, the cliché that today’s news is tomorrow’s ‘chip wrapping’ applies.

It also applies to working in the media. Gigs come and go, and most people assume there’s no such thing as a job for life. This is to be my last column.

I wish it were otherwise, though I can’t complain: I’m lucky to have a day job with Newstalk. Businesses can’t operate on good will. Nonetheless, I was stunned and slightly choked when I counted back how long I have been writing this column. I started in 1999. Fourteen years. I have children who are younger.

This means I have conjured up more than 700 opinions. But I haven’t. I’ve repeated myself, contradicted myself. I’ve changed my mind. Here’s an example: be wary of columnists. No one has 700 opinions. Nor 100. If you boil it all down, our fundamental views on life run to five or six: everything is extrapolated from them. So, for the professional columnist, there’s a pressure to come up with something new, to grab the jugular of controversy. Although they won’t admit it to themselves or others, many columnists are actors, recasting themselves on a weekly basis.

The media has become overrun with ‘opinion’ over the last couple of decades. But it sells papers, and, most importantly, it’s cheaper to produce than journalism. I fear for journalism. It’s become increasingly difficult to produce, and don’t think the naked emperor that is the internet is going to change that.

Last night, I spent an hour trying to convince my 12-year-old daughter’s friend that the illuminati doesn’t exist and that Jay-Z and Rihanna aren’t members of it. She hadn’t read that in what the internet evangelists smugly call the ‘mainstream media’.

The internet is an efficient delivery system; nothing more. The internet doesn’t employ fact checkers. The internet doesn’t want to be fair or impartial or reflect the world. It’s simply wires and servers carrying a lot of stuff: and the vast majority of it is recycled garbage. In the so-called information age, getting to the truth may be more difficult than ever.

Finally, a confession: for the past few years, I’ve been playing a game with a friend. Every week, before I write this column or even choose the subject, they give me a word or a phrase that I must somehow insinuate into the piece. Sometimes this has been difficult to do; sometimes it’s been fanooglebooglewoogle jiggawaggawilly.

I have loved my time here. Farewell.