Sunday, October 10, 2010

Piece on journalism from a new and an old reporter

I have just come across an article that, for me, is the last word on American journalism. It accuses journalists of being lazy, cowardly, and meretricious. And it was written in 1924.
You want criticism?
As Mencken notes, there was — is — only one problem with all this self-seriousness: most journalists are stupid. Not just marginally unintelligent, but, in Mencken’s view, deeply, intractably ignorant — “there are managing editors in the United States, and scores of them, who have never heard of Kant or Johannes Muller and never read the Constitution of the United States; there are city editors who do not know what a symphony is; there are reporters by the thousands who could not pass the entrance examination for a Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale.” On more than one occasion — and I’m sure I’m not the only one — I have had to slow down for a journalist interviewing me and explain to them basic concepts about the story they are writing. These people just are not intellectuals. Many don’t even read books.
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They also are deeply insecure and will brook no criticism — “in general journalism suffers from a lack of alert and competent professional criticism; its slaves, afflicted by a natural inferiority complex, discountenance free speaking as a sort of treason.” True in 1924. Truer today.
Kind of a look from the inside.

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