I was driving back home from South London last week and I was listening to "Last Word", an obituary programme on BBC Radio 4.  There was a discussion of the life of the journalist and author Keith Waterhouse.  I have to admit I haven't read much of his work.  In fact, to be honest, I have read none.  But he was a very respected writer.  Anyway, I listened to a description of his career.  he wrote regularly for Punch, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Mail.  The Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail.  I was driving carefully through pleasant country roads just West of Redhill, but even so, my attention was a little distracted by that.  The Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail.  The Daily Mirror is a real leftie paper, supportive of the Labour party, and the working class.

And the Daily Mail.  What to say about the Daily Mail.  It is the devil's toilet paper.  It is dullard right-wing bias pretending to be respectable.  As the wonderful science journalist Ben Goldacre says, it seems obsessed with dividing the world into things that cause cancer or cure it.  It is very popular because it spreads fear with a patronising smile.  If it could publish a story titled "thinking causes risk of breast cancer in women" it surely would.  Today's top story on their website is: "Attorney General Baroness Scotland's housekeeper is an illegal immigrant".  Perfect.

I am trying to understand the way the mind of someone who would happily write for the Daily Mail after working for the Daily Mirror might work.  Even more difficult might be to understand the mind of someone who could, at the same time, write for both papers.  How do they sleep at night?  How could they, while sitting at their desk in the Daily Mirror, contemplate at some future time, in some other place, looking at the bile-filled faces of Lynda Lee-Potter and Simon Heffer, with their hatred of single mothers and the decline in tie-wearing?
 
For someone like Waterhouse, was journalism about values, or was it just making stuff up for money?