Narcissism: the new journalism

She on the right loves herself. It's not the article photo but one I found on the Times website.

Journalism these days is a reduction - a jus even - of what it once was. A lack of real stories and cultivated opinions means that we are increasingly stuck with vanity writing where journalists, with neither the ability to write nor a point of view, insist on suffusing everything they write with their own personal experience. This is fine if you're hiding with some Burmese dissidents or taking tea with Osama's men in Waziristan, but utterly pointless in most other situations.

Occasionally, someone will come along whose ability to make herself the story transcends anything that has gone before. Step forward Hannah Betts, opining - and whining - in Observer Woman, a newspaper magazine hated by a whole lot of people. In this month's issue, Hannah writes an article on beauty and what a burden it is to a whole lot of people. Well she tries to.

Like everything else in Observer Woman, the article addresses nothing and achieves even less, setting women back by at least 1,250 years. However, it is most outstanding for the amount that the divine Hannah has written about herself. In what must be the most cack-handed attempt at post-modern irony in journalism, Ms Betts includes herself in an article on 'beautiful people.'

Except it's not ironic. We open with Hannah doing her best to convince us that she doesn't have a high opinion of herself. But she falls flat on her perfectly made up face, which pretty much sums up the whole article. The excerpts here are just from the introduction. Oh yes.

"Do I think I'm beautiful? Emphatically not. I scrub up all right, possess a certain sleight of hand, can 'pass' ... However, even this mere passing embroils me in situations that it is impossible to talk about without sounding like an arse ...

Exactly, Hannah. Why not quit while you're ahead?

“Friends routinely remark upon the attention that I draw in public.”

And it’s not fair because it’s not as if you shove it down their throats with articles like this, is it?

Heinously unphotogenic as I am ..

Ah so that's why you let them put your photo in the article. Come now Hannah, that really is disingenuous. Even the stupid, ugly people won’t buy that.

.. in the flesh the way I look elicits extreme responses: transfixed pleasure from babies; adulation from the camper gay man; instant, hackles-raised hostility from certain women."

I know honey. I know. You just want to be ordinary. But you can't because as well as being a great beauty, you're brainy. Hannah was, she tells us, "a former junior academic..and deputy chief leader writer of the Times ..” So when exactly did your brain turn into damp,white bread?

Declarations of love at first sight have been the least unpalatable, albeit lunatic; being treated as arm candy the most banal ('Come with me, you make me look successful,' a city friend inveigled). More times than I care to count, I have been asked whether I would serve as someone's mistress - specifically that word ...

God, Hannah, poor you. All these rich guys wanting to look after you but you refuse because you have a beauty article to write. Noble. Still you'd think with all the offers you have, you'd be familiar with the term 'mistress'. Oh hang on: you're trying to be artless. But you're shit at that too.

'I would have paid for that,' a lover once declared in the aftermath of intercourse, as if this could be in any respect a flattering notion.

But you are flattered aren't you?

“I have been stalked, groped, and been the subject of what in another age might be termed 'sexual slander'. The number of men I am (inaccurately) reputed to have slept with is legion, some of whom I have never even encountered - of little consequence except where the context in which it has been said has been professional.

Bloody hell. So many men are queuing up to enjoy her brain that, inevitably, they grab her tits.

Based on my looks, the assumption tends to be that I am ethereal, unworldly, a receptacle for romantic fantasy; or flighty, provocative, somewhere where lust might be parked. Beauty, the scant portion I can claim of it, has proved double-edged to say the least.”

Up until this point, Hannah, Ms R thought you were just another crappy female journalist with the insight of a gnat, but now she can only sit back and admire the hyperbole. Brilliant! Ms R is not sure how you have the will to go on living. This is definitely a misery memoir in the making. What puzzles her, however, is that surely a journalist of such gravitas as yourself could say,

“Excuse me Ed but I think the angle of this story should be such that it does not include me since I think that would undermine whatever it is that I'm trying to do here.”

But why do that when you can write ever more ridiculous sentences...

“Cabs may screech to a halt, nightclub entry be assured, the occasional upgrade be forthcoming yet ...one is confronted by all those stultifying urban myths: beautiful people are stupid, conceited, humourless, sexually inadequate (since not obliged to make an effort), vain, emotionally stunted, and subject to pathological self-absorption. Before the L'Oreal slogan 'Because I'm worth it' came 'Don't hate me because I'm beautiful'.

What Hannah doesn't realise is that we don't hate her because she's beautiful. We hate her because she sounds like a stupid, conceited, vainglorious, self-obsessed pain in the arse.(She does manage to write several hundred words about other people but they make no sense).

This is simply self-indulgence masquerading as journalism; the same kind of indulgence that sees people like Nigella thrust their lifestyle - real or imagined - down our throats, under the auspices of a TV programme. In this 'look at me' world Ms R thinks it's time for everyone to step back a little from the limelight, and get back to telling the story.

PS: That's not the whole article by the way. That's her bit! Read the link if you can be bothered. Do overseas readers have the same sort of rubbish vomited at them?