Journalists are often the progeny of wealth. It is not a profession that one endeavors to unless eating is secured.
This is not to say that there are no poor people in the business mulling about, but then we would also have to inquire as to the tenuousness of their poverty. If millions of dollars will someday come due via an inheritance, although their bank account may be small today, they have no shortage of ways of industriously collateralizing their eventual windfall.
But this post is not about that, although I felt it had to be said early on. Perhaps I could have just said “people like to eat, the children of rich people like to eat more.”
Journalism has always had propaganda purposes, how it got constitutional protections is beyond me.¹ They’re jailhouse snitches. They’re the greatest story they ever told. They mythologize themselves and each other.²
I think many of them imagine themselves to be smart, or perceptive, or well-read, or well-thought. Do they even imagine themselves to be imaginative, or inquisitive, or original?
Having known many, it’s my experience that not only is what I’ve said entirely accurate, but that they are also lazy and suffisant comme un poisson mort parfumé.
In today’s economy of journalists, the Substack consumer pays their bills and they will write what the lowest level of petty stupid angry monkey people want to see elaborated upon. Did you know that people don’t like to think?³
Thinking takes effort takes effort and effort takes more effort, so it’s easier to pay someone to think what you should be thinking about, and call it a day.
Ultimately they become con artists because their earnings depend not on what is true, but how reality can be shaped to a simple, stupid, regurgitatable simulcra of ‘true’ and pry the wallets of middle class chemically dulled clapping seals.
The End
Notes
¹ I truly can’t figure it out, it’s craziness.
² Oh, ok. Now I figured it out
³ John Gulman, Leonard J, Hinck, Gao D, Zhang Q, Han K, Qian (December 11, 2019).
“Integrated Biological Sensors and delirious effects of thinking about poo.”
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobb.2018.12.015.