Why I Am Not a Journalist

When I was in high school (roughly a decade-and-a-half ago), a civics teacher of mine remarked on a disquieting trend that I had already noticed: group journalism. This teacher's evaluation of the trend was the opposite of mine, however (and I disagreed with him about virtually everything else, as well). He described the then-recent development of groups of journalists reporting and writing as a team in glowing tones, observing that it was a consequence of American culture's retreat from its once-sacred ideal of "rugged individualism." (He described it more as a reevaluation, stipulating that, sometimes, such individualism was still appropriate.) While I think his lip service to rugged individualism more disingenuous now than I did then, I still essentially agree with his estimation and its cause. Where I disagree is that I identify it as a negative trend.

No matter what a culture's implicit foundation and traditions, it cannot survive a constant, explicit battering from antipodal ideas when that foundation was never fully understood by most of its supporters and its traditions were merely understood as traditions, nothing more. So it was with America and its culture of "rugged individualism," and so it had to be with journalism. In high school, I saw how saturated the field of journalism had become with unreason, collectivism, consensus, political correctness, etc. I knew that it had been an ineluctable outcome. The once-great profession of Mencken and Pulitzer had been hijacked by the likes of Duranty and Rather. The few O'Rourkes and Stossels who had managed to gain a foothold, the true journalistic giants who would have been its premiere representatives in a rational culture, were seen as tolerable "balance" at best, adrift in a sea of Weisbergs, Gladwells, and Friedmanns. An aspiring writer (among other things), I knew I was at least a few decades late to have any place in contemporary journalism.

A few days ago, blogger Mike Soja illuminated its inexorable present state in the first sentence of his post:

"It took four people at ABC News to write six sentences."

The rest of his post excoriates the quality (or lack thereof) of the group's sentences: their mangled syntax, lack of relative facts, inaccuracy in regard to other facts, and general unprofessional (and worse) "professionalism."

No wonder so many discerning minds (to the extent that they still exist) are abandoning the likes of ABC News for the non-professionals in the blogosphere. The current government-engineered depression is not even the primary reason for the financial woes of the media (in fact, both phenomena can be traced to the same root cause: a global abandonment of reason).

It is getting to the point where technology and business are the only feasible career opportunities for the rational. Law, where Thomas Jefferson once made his living, has degenerated--with increasingly rare exceptions--into a haven for opportunistic, amoral pragmatists, including but not limited to litigious ambulance chasers and predatory, rights-abrogating prosecutors (to be completely nonpartisan, each exists on the left and right). If Obamacare is not repealed--and future analogous legislation is not stopped--the medical profession will be turned into a holistic bureaucracy, a department of motor vehicles for the health of the nation's people. In the arts and letters, the situation is even more dire, pushing Edward Cline and Radley Balko to obscurity while making household names of the mediocre, conventional, and statist (to the extent that any writer is a household name any more).

Perhaps it is appropriate that I share these observations on Ray Bradbury's ninetieth birthday. Bradbury is a creative artist who devotes most of his energies to dreaming of better worlds and showing us the unavoidable outcome of the worst aspects of this one (the prescient Fahrenheit 451, contrary to popular belief, is more about the deleterious effects of mass media on intelligence and awareness than government censorship). He leaves the reporting and editorializing to others.

Someone must pick up the journalistic--and, more important, philosophical--slack, however (or help increase awareness of those who are doing it right). Fiction alone will not save us.