Why finance sucks the life out of Britain (and journalism)

The media is not as clever as it likes to think

A couple of years back I took a brief career detour, writing internally for a finance company, and the most startling realisation of that short episode was that journalists really aren’t very bright. I considered myself to be not the least intelligent person in the media — life would be unbearable if our ego didn’t protect our self-image with a wall of illusion — but compared to almost everyone in asset management I was John Terry.

Sometimes I could see the tired exasperation in my colleagues’ faces as they tried their best to explain some completely basic concept to me, my eyes slowly whirling around as my outwitted brain tried to grasp today’s lesson. It was like Blackadder explaining maths to Baldrick — and almost anyone in journalism would have been the stupidest person in the room, by some distance. Or politics, for that matter.