Art & Creativity Quote by Ian Hislop

Hislop’s line is a wink and a warning: the fantasy that journalism can be reduced to compliance paperwork is exactly that, a fantasy. Coming from an editor best known for skewering public hypocrisy, the phrasing lands with deliberate flatness. “Hard and fast rules” and “printed booklet” evoke the bureaucratic comfort blanket institutions love to demand after every scandal: codify a mess, laminate it, pretend judgment can be outsourced.

The specific intent is to defend editorial discretion while refusing to romanticize it. Sources aren’t a tidy hierarchy of “good” and “bad”; they’re people with motives, access, grudges, and sometimes courage. A rigid rulebook can’t tell you when an anonymous whistleblower is essential versus when “a source close to the matter” is just reputation laundering. Hislop’s subtext is that the real work happens where policies stop: weighing credibility, corroboration, risk, and harm in real time, under deadline pressure and legal threat.

Context matters here: British journalism has lived through periodic moral panics about ethics and sourcing, often followed by calls for tighter codification. Hislop, positioned between the newsroom and the public’s demand for accountability, pushes back on the idea that legitimacy comes from checklists. He’s also quietly pointing at the uncomfortable corollary: if there’s no booklet, there’s no hiding. Responsibility sits with editors and reporters, and the consequences of getting it wrong can’t be filed under “procedure followed.”