Contrarian Journalism

Contrarian Journalism
A contrarian is an “Individual who acts in the opposite way to popular opinion.” Philosophically, a contrarian is a person who tends to take positions that openly challenge conventional wisdom. In finance, a contrarian is one who attempts to profit by investing in a manner that differs from the conventional wisdom, when the consensus opinion appears to be wrong. The contrarian in the world of finance is motivated only by the prospect of economic gain. Journalism has also had it contrarians who flourish by swimming against the tide.
Two writers who illustrate the characteristics of the contrarian journalism very well are Christopher Hitchens and Malcolm Muggeridge, who happen to share an interest in Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Being contrarians, however, their views are diametrically opposed. Hitchens consolidated his reputation as a contrarian by attacking Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who had shot to celebrity status world-wide as the result of the efforts of Malcolm Muggeridge.
It could argued that Muggerdige is the original contrarian journalist. He once reflected with apparent pride on the fact that he thought he was the only person banned simultaneously from visiting both South Africa and the USSR.
His troubles with the USSR started early in his contrarian career. As a journalist he visited the Ukraine at the height of the famine induced by forced collectivisation without a guide from Soviet authorities.
His reports of the famine and their causes were graphic but brought only opprobrium. No other journalist had visited the areas affected without Soviet 'guides'. His reports, he later wrote, “brought me no kudos, and many accusations of being a liar”. After the death of Stalin, Khrushchev confirmed Muggeridge’s account, but Muggeridge had moved on.
By the 1950’s he found the Royal family far better targets. Attacking the British Royal family at the height of their popularity, brought him the same opprobrium that his earlier attacks on the USSR had brought. He used the phrase "Soap Opera" to describe the royal family's life in the media, a phrase that now seems both mild and prophetic in its accuracy.
When Christian Barnard had performed the world's first heart transplant in Apartheid South Africa, Muggeridge asked whether it was significant that the operation had been performed in a place where the attitude to human life was well known. The media panel were suitably outraged by the question and refused to recognise the question.
Hitchens subsequently matched this by asking Barnard, to his considerable annoyance in a television interview, what he thought of the view expressed by Aparthied President Vorster that Barnard was the best ambassador the Apartheid rgime had.
Like Muggeridge, Hitchens seems to have been made just to be fired by media moguls. Conrad Black was reported to have bought The Spectator so he could personally fire Hitchens. "Hitchens had been writing nasty things about Black's friend, Ronald Reagan. Black, as it turns out, was just too late in acquiring The Spectator as Hitchens had already moved on to another paper."
If there one motto that sums up the outlook of the contrarian journalist it is the quip by Muggeridge: "Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream."

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