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Knighthoods errant

With the Queen's birthday honours imminent, a distinguished writer questions whether working journalists should accept such rewards. McCrystal writes: We cannot claim that our virtues blossom on our natures or our work as radiantly, unselfconsciously, and inevitably as the flower on the hawthorn bough. Those government and parliamentary people who claim otherwise by "honouring" certain journalists may be classified as a tribunal of mediocrity. And what does that make us? Should our sights be on a gong and its intimations of flunkeyism and hypocrisy, or on the morass of misery and sweated labour at the bottom of society; a morass sustaining an edifice of competitive commerce as greedy as it is merciless? And he concludes: I cannot see that a scrupulous effort to maintain distance between the journalist and the state should not be regarded as crucial to effective journalism and an easy conscience.

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