Let us now praise journalists who are not nearly so famous as they deserve to be

It is in the nature of modern journalism (as with so much in our world) that sounding intelligent and interesting is more important than actually being intelligent and interesting. Examples of mediocrities who play the game well: Andrew Sullivan, Ron Rosenbaum, Christopher Hitchens (Yah, you want me to add Gladwell, too. Well to hell with that: everyone's on him right now. And he's not the worst offender by a long shot.) An counter-example would be David Cayley, who I am almost certain you have never heard of. Much of this could be attributed to the fact that he's Canadian, except that I doubt most Canadians have heard of him, either. They might know who Gwynne Dyer is: they have almost certainly heard of names like Barbara Frum or David Suzuki. But Cayley is not a household name anywhere except maybe his own house; he barely has a Wikipedia page.

David Cayley has produced work for the Canadian radio series Ideas for the past 25 years or so. His masterpiece may be the recent 22-episode set of radio interviews on the idea of science in the modern world, although it's hard to pick a favorite because almost everything the man does is so good. When I was just out of college, Cayley's work, along with some magazine stuff that Taylor Branch did on race in modern America, were what made me want to be a journalist. People like that made journalism out to be a place where you could write about ideas and communicate to people who normally didn't think about the sorts of things that you were talking about. What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was that most working journalists don't get the kind of gig that Cayley got: writing hour-long docs for a government-sponsored radio program that doesn't need to make a profit. Well okay: he's made better use of that opportunity than most people would. Cayley always challenges the listeners, and he always challenges himself. A good illustration of this is his most recent piece on Ideas. It's about critics of the global warning consensus. I haven't listened to the whole piece and I don't have the scientific chops to critique it in any case, but here's the thing: Cayley is no shill for the oil companies. He's been writing about environmental issues since the 80s, and generally from a point of view sympathetic to environmentalists. The first time I ever heard about "deep ecology" was when I heard an interview that Cayley did with the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.

Cayley doesn't do a piece on the arrogance of the scientific status quo because he wants to preen. He does it because he's genuinely curious, and always ready to concede that he might not be as smart as he thinks. He is an intellectual contrarian in a way that poseurs like Hitchens or Sullivan can only dream of being.