An intriguing feature of our time is the near universal contempt for journalists. The facts speak for themselves: they are some of the least trusted people in society, and amidst this frenzy of disdain, the industry has been forced to re-market itself to a sycophantic base of subscribers. When we talk about a loss of trust in the resulting system, we’re not just talking about a now extensive catalogue of mistakes, selective narratives and cynical omissions but a far deeper schism: we have lost complete faith in the old myths that sustained it. 

News was always a confidence trick, perhaps one of the few industries where it had to conjure the illusion of its own demand. Much of its mythos was formed in the 20th century: to take his place in the liberal democracy, the citizen had to be informed. Those trusted to do so were at least expected to have the common man’s interests at heart. Occasionally, this vague ideal flared up as high drama speaking truth to power: Nixon brought down by two dishevelled hacks behind a typewriter. A rogue NSA agent revealing the government was spying on us. But ours is an age of cynicism and these stories no longer resonate en masse. The romance is with the citizen journalist, the purveyor of the stories untold and ignored. The cult of the professional journalist is dead. 

This apocalypse for the industry echoed in my ears throughout the three hours I spent watching the latest dramatisation of Emily Maitlis’s 2019 interview with Prince Andrew. What is the Very Royal Scandal actually about, apart from an interview everyone can watch on YouTube? In some respects it’s different from Scoop, its four month old Netflix counterpart. Michael Sheen plays Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis is an executive producer. Google tells us that the series is based on her memoir Airheads: The Imperfect Art of Making News. Learning this makes one paranoid, not least because the actress playing her pulls off the role by being simultaneously scatty and smug. At times it’s like we’re watching the real thing. And this is not good news for a programme that I suspect secretly hopes to revive the dying cult of the journalist. 

In terms of positioning Maitlis as the underdog, the drama has a lot of heavy lifting to do

After all, on paper the story is a perfect contemporary vehicle to reinvigorate the old 20th century myths of the profession. Maitlis is a confident woman taking on a grubby male alliance of royalty and global finance. Their victims are young women and the medium is that old relic mass media: the big audience broadcast interview. But none of these constituent parts seem to add up. Is this speaking truth to power? Or shooting royal fish in the barrel? In fact, the drama itself seems to secretly know this, because in true postmodern fashion it has one eye on that cynical world which no longer wants to play along with the self professed ideals of the profession. 

In terms of positioning Maitlis as the underdog, the drama has a lot of heavy lifting to do. In the real world, Maitlis is married to an investment banker with a career incubated in a decadent, overindulged institution. Photos of her sat next to Cameron and Osborne, stroking Peter Mandelson’s bow tie often emerge when she claims to be working on behalf of the people. But in this world, in a classic Hollywood rendering of the journalist on screen, she’s a working mum fighting bureaucracy and home life to speak truth to power. She bangs bowls of cereal down as she bemoans backbench Tories scuppering May’s Deal. She comes home to find dogshit on the kitchen floor. Maitlis goes “viral” on social media for rolling her eyes in an interview about Brexit. The face of the biased BBC shouts the deranged mob online. God it’s tough. If it was Paxman then no one would have cared she muses aloud. 

Prince Andrew is the perfect foil for this struggle: flabby, rude and deluded, embodying the villainous fantasy for the post-1997 middle classes who still dream of defenestrating a decadent and corrupt aristocracy. He grins yellowed teeth in a darkened room as he begs Epstein for money. He sneers and leers at a nervous Maitlis, who just about holds it together to ask him a series of very difficult questions. Watching this in 2024 is all a bit confusing. The only thing ever really at stake was the Queen’s reputation and the post-war unity she cobbled together. Both are now dead. Royalty is a story badly shared by the tabloids, high tories and midwestern housewives. 

Most importantly, nothing substantial about Epstein and his crimes is touched on. Knowledge on the part of the audience is assumed: that Andrew is guilty, or that even if he wasn’t he deserves to be for the crime of being loathsome. In its place we get a caricature that serves as a helpful piñata — a leering villain waiting to be brought down by the forces of good and journalism. But the script and its ludicrous attempts to press tension (the interview is on, then it’s off, then it’s on) carry an inconvenient truth. This was never a triumph for journalism or the BBC, it was a PR disaster by an insecure and nervous palace, poked into insanity and maddened by the weight of its global brand.

By the end, we are left with Maitlis wondering if the interview is distracting from victims of Epstein’s sex trafficking. She has become the story. (The viewer, unsurprisingly, has little sympathy given this is the 2nd dramatisation of the story in less than six months.) Besides, Andrews’ involvement was always a tabloid footnote to a far more sinister story. Maxwell and Epstein were a socialite node for an elite that lauded over a world now curiously heralded in an age of populism. Indeed, their acquaintances still exert a soft power. The Clintons were close to Epstein. So too was Lord Mandelson, who was last rumoured to be lined up as ambassador to the US. But all these inconvenient details are left to the imagination of the internet and its allegorical conspiracies. This is the cosy world of the BBC and The Royal Family, a stage for the romantic myths of journalism. Not the vulgar and conspiratorial insinuation that Epstein died because he knew too much. 

The industry became a vehicle for narcissists and self promotion

Some find it ludicrous that this dramatised PR has selected Maitlis’s star. I find it fitting. Maitlis embodies a profession whose idealistic longings have become warped and partisan. When she finally broke the shackles of impartiality, at the BBC all she did was tell us what we knew she already thought: that Nigel Farage is responsible for all the UK’s problems and Brexit ruined Britain. Whether anyone, even she, actually believes this is besides the point. She is the old myths of the profession set loose and gone haywire in a post-journalistic world where news now works as a strange mix of entertainment and emotional affirmation. Just this week, another news presenter went viral for pressing Tory leader candidate Robert Jenrick. What did he mean by English identity? Of course behind this barely veiled disdain was no actual argument. But that’s besides the point, the spectacle of speaking truth to power, as empty as it now is, was preserved. 

And this I suspect is why everyone now hates journalists. The twentieth century mistakenly blessed it with ideals of grandeur that set it on a path for self destruction. The industry became a vehicle for narcissists and self promotion. The moment it touched fame or notoriety, the actual work died.  To make an actual drama about journalists would be nigh on impossible, because the best ones are strange and obsessive people who belong to the shadows. And besides, who needs fiction to lay bare the conceited drama of the profession? We are already living in that world.