Knocking Journalism off its Pedestal

There has been endless commentary in the blogosphere and real world about Jon Stewart’s takedown of CNBC/Jim Cramer.  One piece of commentary I particularly liked was Glenn Greenwald’s use of the Stewart/Cramer match as a platform to talk about the ills of journalism as a profession.  The money quote is also the concluding paragraph:

What I think Greenwald is basically arguing against is the philistine nature of modern journalism.  Journalists hold themselves in high-esteem as not only well-versed in the area of their reporting but as essential essentializers and conduits between the experts and ordinary people.  And because of their education and access to power, they can expose corruption, scandal, etc. that elites would otherwise try to pass over on common people.  This focus on the disciplinatory power of journalism has been the profession’s traditional self-defense, and their failure to live up to those ideals has forced them to provide an explanation.  Instead of doing the courageous thing, which is to say, “Hey, we failed the American people over the last eight years.  We are not as rigorous or smart as we say we are,” they instead pass the hot potato to the elites.  Instead, journalists say, “We’re just letting them air their message.  We are conduits of information, that is all.”  How those who argue that the role of journalism is to broadcast the government and elite’s message, and do nothing else, do not see themselves as effectively tools of the elite, hardly different than government-controlled media, is baffling.  Any analysis of the causes of this crisis cannot overlook the role of the media in fanning the flames on the upside and downside.

I want to add one other quick caveat.  I think part of the problem with journalism is that they do not realize that they are mainly talking to themselves.  Here, I am talking not only about news publication but media in general: TIME, Dwell, US Weekly, and almost any commercial portray and glorify upper-middle class lifestyles.  Want to try the new Folgers?  It helps if you have stainless steel appliances and an antique breakfast table, apparently.  Want a clean, comfortable home?  That will require expensive furniture, designer housing, and six figures, says Dwell.  Want a delicious red wine to go with that fresh caught Tuna?  Try a “cheap” $18 bottle merlot from Napa Valley, says Newsweek.  (Wine Spectator of course knows that you never mix red wine and fish.)  Incensed at Obama’s tax on the middle-class?  You are if appear on the D.C. Sunday circuit and believe that middle-class families make $250,00 per year.  You probably believe this because you have discretionary income for subscriptions to news magazines with “large” circulation.  (I use the sarcastic quotation marks because a large circulation for a non-gossip magazine totals less than 1% of America’s population.)  Then journalists read these magazines that have articles which describe their lifestyle and have pictures of manicured lawns they can afford, so they assume that this is “normal” America.  In other words, I believe that the vast majority of our elite-level journalists (New York Times, Meet the Press, The O’Reilly Factor, that asshole from CNBC who asked traders what they think about Obama’s mortgage plan) do not realize that they are not abnormal.  Magazine and newspapers and news shows may appear to reach a lot of people, but our brains are also not good at assigning relative values to absolute numbers.