The phenomenon manifests itself in a number of distinct variants. For another, it feeds into some of the most negative perceptions of a media which talks to itself in order to decide what the nation thinks. For one thing, as the Lone Ranger discovered, it is based on an assumption that can easily be disproved, which is always unwise. But, apart from the hard news pages, that war was lost a long time ago, first to the New Journalism of the 1960s, which shoehorned the writer into the middle of every story, and then to a still-flowing deluge of personality-driven confessional columnists and commentators.Ĭlass, age, wealth, culture, gender, geography and much else mean that our interests do not coincide, or that they may be directly at odds with each otherīut “we” is arguably even more pernicious than “I” as a mode of discourse. Successive generations of curmudgeons proclaimed, despite evidence to the contrary, that “there’s no ‘I’ in journalism”. Within journalism, more concern is usually expressed about the dangers of the first person singular pronoun than the plural. To be fair to our critic, he was making a valid point about the complicity of the audience in the worst excesses of mass popular culture, but the completely valid response illustrated perfectly the danger attendant on the use of the first person plural in public discourse: it can and will be read as presumptuous arrogance or blinkered groupthink. I do wish people in the media would stop using the term ‘we’ every time they make a pronouncement from on high.”
“In fact, I have no interest in her at all. “I, for one, have never leered at the lady in question,” wrote the indignant letter-writer. and who couldn’t get enough of her breakdowns, her head-shaving, her disastrous personal life.” It was we who delighted in the stories of her impoverished upbringing as a Bible Belt ‘hick’. Last week, for example, a letter to this newspaper took exception to the suggestion, in a review of the documentary Framing Britney Spears, that “we were the ones who leered at Britney. The gag often comes to mind when objections are raised about the use of the first person plural pronoun by journalists. “Well, Tonto old friend, looks like we’re surrounded,” the Lone Ranger says to his faithful companion, who curtly replies, “What do you mean ‘we’, paleface?” In an old Mad magazine joke from the 1950s, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are riding through a deep ravine when they suddenly find themselves ambushed from all sides by hundreds of heavily-armed Indians.