Is Toby Young the worst journalist in the world?

[DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com]

Sorry about this unstructured rant, but there's something about the words:

>By Toby Young

that just pushes my buttons.  He used to write an insanely annoying column
in the Standard about his life in New York working for Vanity Fair (since
sacked), which basically consisteed of telling his adoring readers time and
again how he had once more not been let into the fashionable party of the
week because the "clipboard Nazi" (somewhat repugnant phrase) "didn't think
I was famous enough."  I was actually moved to write a letter to the editor
pointing out that he indeed, wasn't famous enough.  He also has previous
form with the dreaded Burchill.

What a priceless collection of gems, I mean:

<<To those accustomed to working for Tina, the
                long hours Talk's staff had to put in came
                as no surprise. "I remember that for one
                stretch of four months I was never home
                before the end of the eleven o'clock news,">>

ahh f'kng diddums.  After starting at ten in the morning no doubt.

<<"As recently as two weeks before closing
                they hadn't decided what was going to be in
                the magazine.">>

Congratulations Sherlock.  We get some idea of how much this writer might
understand about a news magazine from their understanding of the word
"recently".

<< "Tina is her own art director and is
                spectacularly abusive of people in the
                visual department who work for her," he
                says, "I mean really quite shocking. Yelling
                at them, abusive language, you know, 'This
                is fucking dull, this is fucking boring,
                what's wrong with you? Go get me something.
                I want it in four hours, I want it in two
                hours, I want it in thirty minutes, I want
                it now.' That kind of stuff.">>

ahh f'kng diddums.  Is it just me who lives in some sort of Liar's Poker
dystopia, or are these people being a leetle bit precious?

<<One long-standing minion of
                Tina's recalls that on her first day at work
                at Vanity Fair there was an impromptu
                leaving party for someone who'd been at the
                magazine for years. "When she found out they
                were throwing a party for her she said,
                'Does this mean I'll finally get to meet
                Tina Brown?'">>

oh for bloody hell's sake.

<<                In 1985 Tina asked him to commission a short
                story for the Christmas issue and he managed
                to persuade Isaac Bashevis Singer to write
                one. He turned it in and a few days later it
                came back to him with the words "Beef it up
                Singer" scrawled on the bottom in big red
                letters.

                "I had to gently explain to Tina," laughs
                Heilpern, "that 'Beef it up Singer' was a
                recipient of the Nobel Prize for
                Literature.">>

Of course, no Nobel Prize winner has ever churned out hack-work for a
magazine, ever.

It's not like I want to read this magazine or anything.  But Toby Young
really desperately needs to be conscripted into the army or something.

dd





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