Pope Francis gives his first press conference today but he will not give interviews. He does not like the press. "Journalists", he said once "risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia". In case your Greek is deficient, this means that we love shit and encourage others to consume it. So are we really bluebottles – noisy carriers of filth who get everywhere, and rest only to preen their glittering bodies, convinced their blue-green and metallic sheen is the most fashionable colour in the world? Of course, many religious people would extend this analogy to point out that flies serve their lord, Beelzebub, and they swarm around the world.
A religious journalist might respond that the world we cover serves up plenty to sate the coprophiliac appetite. If you're a religious news journalist most of your job consists of talking to Christians so that they can tell you lies about each other. If you cover the Vatican, this is certainly true. I don't know anyone who has been converted by the people they cover.
I also know a hell of a lot of bluebottles. There is something profoundly phony about journalism, and the more it pretends to offer personal insights, the phonier it gets. Reading almost any interview bears the same relationship to taking part in a conversation with the subject as watching porn does to making love. In both cases it's actors faking it for the money that strangers will give them because they enjoy the spectacle. Anyone who becomes famous for their opinions will find that the audience wants them to become a karaoke act miming to the hit that made them famous.
Then there is the destruction of privacy in little ways, like the publication of the evidence of the Huhne's family breakdown in the form of the texts. I read them, of course I did, and perhaps you did too. But it was still wrong to publish them.
So we feed some pretty disgusting appetites, but we excite them, too.
Yet still I think that there are some of us who are a little better than bluebottles – who are, perhaps, better compared to maggots. The maggot looks less appetising than the full-grown fly (unless you're a fish) but it is on the side of health. Maggots will nibble away at rotting tissue to clean up wounds. A wound with flies on it is infected; a wound with maggots in it is on its way to health. Some journalists may even be caterpillars, industrious vegetarians who will one day turn into butterflies. Of course the sight of maggots is unpleasant, but they are not coprophiliac.
And though an awful lot of nonsense is talked about the public's right to know, journalism at its best can stop the public from claiming a right to forget. What the public wants to know or to pretend to know is often things to which it has no right at all. The business of celebrity is devoted to feeding an appetite which should not be gratified, although we know that it's entirely genuine. Most of the apparatus of journalism is devoted to producing endless novelty without any freshness at all. Nonetheless, we can, and should, work away like maggots to remind the world that what it would like to believe is often false and that under the bandage of sentimentality there is real goodness, real pain, and real corruption too.