I grew up around journalists. In the 50s and 60s, Journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for—it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job. They tended to be working-class guys who had an attitude about power. They saw themselves as being working people, and they had an emotional mandate to stick-it-to-the-man. I remember those people—when I grew up there was this kind of iconoclastic attitude. There are still some people who are from that world—Seymour Hersh is a great example. The guy grew up in newspapers and still just fucking hates people, and works in this dirty little office in Washington—he doesn't do fancy lunches. But somewhere along the line, in the 80s or 90s, after All The Presidents Men came out, journalism became this very fashionable profession, a thing for the Ivy League kids. If you go on the campaign trail, what you find is a lot of people who are really turned on by the experience of being near powerful people. They see themselves as being on the same team as the people that they're covering. I think we saw this very clearly with the [Michael] Hastings thing—all these reporters were saying "how could you betray your source?" which is a crazy attitude for a journalist to have. You would have never seen that twenty or thirty years ago, and that's kind of de rigueur now.
1 comment:
Hersh sound a lot like bloggers of today.
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