When I was considering carrying on in journalism, one reason I didn’t do so is because journalists didn’t do* anything. The journalist’s job is either to report on his/her fellow humans, or to complain about the world. Journalists and critics don’t go out and change the world. It’s easier to complain than do.
I wanted to be that change and not just report it. Sometimes I’ve succeeded, sometimes I have not. Elizabeth Nickson, another renegade former journalist and Canadian (her career include stints as an editor at Time and Life magazine) describes acerbically the delusions of the contemporary press corps. For some reason, modern journalists consider themselves to be the peers of their subjects:
Average journalism-school graduates watched their fellow undergrads go on to wealth in finance, innovation in technology, or power in politics. Meanwhile, the high Masters of Journalism are struggling to avoid replacement by college interns and to out-write AI software. After years in expensive schools cozying up to the right people, they believe that an equal professional respect is due. The trouble is, they’ve done little to earn it.
The media follows a socialism of status, demanding cultural equity with the newsmakers they cover. The members of the media don’t realize that the elites consider them with as little regard as does their dwindling audience. Striving for acceptance into the right social circles makes them all the more desperate to parrot the conventional wisdom of the ruling class. See, I’m on your team, the reporter thinks, as the Vice Undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture (Tropical Fruit Division) glances across the room to find someone worthy of his notice….
Perhaps journalists could improve…by not catastrophizing every issue that has plagued humanity since ancient Sumer. But one crisis left unnoticed has doomed journalism to dwindling audiences, rising irrelevance, and public contempt. Newsrooms from Washington to San Francisco, New York to London, suffer from a humility crisis. What makes this odd is that journalists have so much to be humble about.
This is part of her essay contributed to Michael Walsh’s new book Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You (2024).
I’m far from certain I could bear to read 448 pages about the contemporary press but for those who care about fourth estate, it looks like obligatory reading.
On a serious note, what’s gone wrong with journalism is the tendency for publications to no longer pay their reporters properly and no profits from the press. Journalists need a side gig. Side gigs depend on being considered “easy to work with” and “cooperative. Almost all newspapers and magazines are money losers now, and their future existence depends not on their readers, but on their advertisers and their corporate sponsors.
Courage has left the building, and modern mainstream journalists have become PR hacks instead of investigative/critical journalists.
Substack and independent websites provide the vast majority of serious reporting these days. The decline started with the rise of the internet. Journalists slowly became toothless from as far back as the year 2000.
* I wrote regularly for The Economist, The Moscow Times, Dance International; produced news spots for ABC Television and short documentaries for Radio-Canada.