Columnist confesses about his trade

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): It was 25 years ago, and I was fulminating about how stupid journalists are. You know how it is: if you know anything about a subject yourself, then what the journalists write about it always seems slightly wrong. So there had been a coup in Turkey, and The Times had got it wrong -- and to shut me up, my wife (as she then was) said: "Why don't you write something about it yourself?"

I stopped as if I had been shot. "Can I do that?" I said -- meaning am I allowed to do that, because it had never occurred to me that you could just send the paper an article and they might publish it. So I did, and they did, and I showed all my friends a copy of the article in The Times and sent my mother a clipping. They paid me, too, but that was almost a bonus.

But it's like a drug. My sole qualifications were that I had been in a couple of navies, picked up a couple of degrees in history, and knocked around Europe and the Middle East a bit, but soon I was writing several articles a month for the London broadsheets: The Guardian, The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times. And then I discovered that none of them would run articles by outside contributors more than once a month.

Production was outrunning demand, so 25 years ago this month I went global. I sent my articles to papers all around the world -- and some of them, to my secret astonishment, started using them at once. So now I have been a global pundit for a quarter- century, and it's time for a confession: you have to be a fraud to write a column like this.

The problem is that you cannot have the up-to-date local knowledge you need to write two or three times a week about every part of the world for an audience that lives in every part of the world until you have been doing this full-time for five or ten years. It's a steep learning curve, and there are no apprenticeship schemes. So you just have to start doing it, and skate around the people you haven't yet met and the places you haven't yet been, until you have the time to get on top of your material.

If you're good enough at faking it, they'll send you money for your opinions anyway. If you're wise, you'll use a lot of that money to fill in the blanks on your personal map. And after ten years or so, those dreams about being caught in public wearing nothing but your Maidenform bra will get less frequent.

Not that you'll ever really know what's going on, because nobody does.

But you'll know more than most of the other frauds who pretend to have a handle on the world, and that's good enough: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed journalist seems wise.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed an American journalist who had just won instant fame by parlaying a long trip through some of the worst hell-holes in the world into a sweeping theory that the entire planet was about to divide into guarded and gated estates for the rich, surrounded by swarming cesspits of poverty, disease and violence where the other 90 percent of the human race would pass their brief and bitter lives.

It was complete nonsense, of course, but it sold very well in a post-Cold War Washington where all the think-tanks were looking for a new global threat. So suddenly our man was the new global pundit -- and when I needed a straw man who would earnestly propound this theory in a radio series I was doing at the time, who better than the original source?

So I interviewed him (I don't think he even asked to be paid), and got him to talk about places where it seemed to me that the course of events argued strongly against his theory. Within minutes he was way out of his depth. He couldn't afford to admit that he had never been to South Africa, or South Korea, or wherever, so he faked it -- and once I realized what he was doing, it was dead easy to lead him on to bigger and more blatant fakeries.

It was a cruel game, and after ten minutes or so I stopped it. I didn't call him on it to his face, and I never used the tape, because I suddenly realized that he was doing exactly what I had done at the start.

You have to fake it at first, because most people have no idea how big and complicated the world is, and expect a "global expert" to have answers for everything.

I have seen what this man has been writing more recently, and he's doing fine. He's spending every spare minute traveling to fill in the blanks, and his analysis gets better by the month. But it's only by being recognized as a certified global pundit that you may eventually get the time, money and access to earn that title.

So tell us, oh ancient of days: what have you learned from your twenty-five years in the punditry trade?

Probably less than I should have, but you can't write 3,300 articles on international affairs (three a week for fifteen years, then two a week for the past ten) without reaching some conclusions about the way the world works, and how that changes. And the most important thing I have learned, by far, is that the world is not nearly as stupid and nasty as the news would lead you to believe.

I am not naive. I have seen the wars, the famines, and the genocides, and I have met any number of psychopathic liars, mass murderers, religious fanatics and nationalists. But from the Cold War to apartheid to the "population bomb", the "debt bomb", and the "Bomb bomb", most things have turned out far better than even the moderate optimists expected. Moreover, the world is a far more rational, less violent, and even kinder place than it used to be.

I suspect that you don't believe me, because 90 percent of the "news", almost by definition, is bad news. But that's the proportion left after the editorial selection process is finished. From this side of the news, and with the benefit of a long perspective in the trade, it looks different.