Janet Street-Who?

I like to think that, as a rule, I’m pretty immune to people that are desperate to be looked at. I’m very good at turning the other cheek in that respect – I have no idea who won last year’s “The X Factor”, and I can only assume that this “Big Brother – Celebrity Hijack” is some sort of joke. Janet Street-Porter, however, has flown by my radar twice over the last few days or so, and her various outpourings are, I think, worthy of comment. In last Saturday’s edition of The Independent, she put together the “radical” point of view that blogs are a “waste of time”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for someone that talks enormous amounts but actually says very little, there’s very little in the above piece that actually offers very much insight other than “Janet has read a couple of bad blogs”, but all of the tell-tale signs of the out of touch old bluffer who is losing their youth and doesn’t much like it are there.

I’m kind of aware that a certain type of  journalist is always going to be scared of the blog and the blogger. They don’t understand the concept of anyone apart from themselves having a valid opinion. They consider it a threat. Janet Street-Porter almost certainly gets paid a six figure sum for writing, and suddenly there are thousands, possibly millions, of people that are doing this for nothing. They’re doing it for the love of writing. For someone like Janet, who has got used to a very comfortable lifestyle for writing with very, very little in the way of quality control going on, this is a worrying development. If people are offering a similar service to the one that she offers free of charge, she might not, in time, be able to get her shilling. She might get found out.

The good news for Janet is that, for the moment, she still has access to a national newspaper . She is, for the time being, the one holding the foghorn. She can perpetuate the myth (and it’s a myth that you only ever see in the printed media) that all blogs are dull, written by idiots, or the self-aggrandising rich. There are millions of blogs. It’s not difficult to go out and find some bad ones to prove a point that it very much benefits her to make. Saying that there are no good blogs is like saying that there is no good television or that there is no good cinema. It merely betrays ignorance on your own part.

I managed to resist the temptation to post on this subject at the weekend, but this morning Janet was on the television, shamelessly whoring her new book (which is called “Life Is Too Fucking Short” or some such) on Five’s “The Wright Stuff”. Her book promises, in the uniquely egotistical way that she would, to sort your life out and make you feel about a hundredth as brilliant about yourself as Janet evidently feels about herself. You get the feeling that Janet is going to “mature” into some sort of appalling “rocking granny”, flashing V-signs and belching “girl power” in the apparent belief that it is still 1997. Now, “The Wright Stuff” is normally a programme that I can normally tolerate and, to my surprise, I often find myself nodding my head sagely in agreement with Rick Wright, who at least takes the time to read up on most of the subjects that he is tackling and is, by extension, one of the more tolerable daytime television hosts. However, after five minutes of Janet clucking on about how great she obviously is, I switched the television off and put a DVD on instead.

You see, that’s the thing about Janet. The quacking noise that comes from her is the sound of the twentieth century. She simply isn’t prepared for a more democratic media, because she is the ultimate Big I Am. She cannot tolerate the fact that there may be better writers out there than her that are prepared to share what they do with the world for nothing other than the fact that they love doing it. Of course, you could argue quite cogently that I am jealous of her but, actually, I think that the opposite is true. She is jealous of those of us with time on our sides – those of us that understand this new, democratic media. This media which is no longer a lucrative way for the likes of Janet Street-Porter to unilaterally force their opinions down the throats of the rest of us. She doesn’t like it, and she is lashing out. Getting in her pre-meditative strikes. The rest of the world, though, isn’t bothered. Her quacking will get fainter and fainter as the years go on, until it is a very slight sound in the distance. On a good day, you’ll just about be able to hear it  and you’ll vaguely recognise the sound, but won’t quite be able to make out what it is actually is. It’ll be Janet Street-Porter. The voice of the past.