Permanently Deleted
I’ve literally never met a worse group of people than the mostly Guardian & Times hacks I ended up at weekend conference with in another life. Still makes my skin crawl.
In the US, it tends to be a result of capitalist gatekeeping. Journalism requires unpaid or poorly paid internships, doesn’t pay a lot, and sets a high bar on access to jobs (journalism degree + experience), that keeps out oiks.
That’s why we had all the “Cletus safaris” of Columbia grads venturing, pith hat on, into the wilds of Ohio to interview Trump supporters. They couldn’t imagine that people in their class would vote for or support Trump, so they had to go explore East Bumfuck for people who matched their conception of what a Trump voter is. Whereas someone who’d come up poor might have a much more realistic view of who Trump supporters are.
1000000%- as a literal Columbia Journalism grad (80k in debt later…), this is almost complete true. There are comrades too, but lots of libby west-wing types. I will say, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the class consciousness of some of my colleagues. at least when it comes to how our own office is run
This is the shit posting I come here for. The media class (and I’m including the Chapos to some extent) is contemptuous of the public. They love to amplify a story, get a bunch of people mad online, and then turn around a shame them for getting mad. See: The Alex Morse story. Jacobin couldn’t help themselves from accusing the rest of us of falling for a sex panic. Motherfuckers, I wouldn’t have known about the story if you hadn’t posted it everywhere on every site I read. You’re supposed to be the sober, guiding force in the discourse. Fucking jabronis.
Uhhh, every story on Alex Morse I read was about the deliberate DNC-funded sabotage, which I consider pretty damn salient. Was he making national headline news before that reveal?
Was literally just ranting about this today. Look at my most recent post history.
My journalist colleagues talked about upholding democracy by wanting Trump to get better (it makes them “better” people or something) and then they’d launch into 15-minute diatribes on how significant watching LOTR for the first time was for them. Fucking dumb liberal shit to the core, Christ.
Journalism: Don’t regret it, but solely because it taught me the valuable lesson that I won’t always know what I’ll actually want in life. Started as a super-lib and left a washed-out sucker. The average reporters I met were nauseatingly status-quo – either true-and-through bootlickers or too naive to realize themselves as free PR agents for people in power. There’s something about years of condensing complicated situations to a few grafs for laymen which rots your brain into an endless chasm of cheap metaphors, impotent virtue-signaling rage, and other cliche nonsense. Met a few good ones who felt trapped like I did, but my experiences with the industry and the average journalist I met were eyerolling. I’ve worked manual labor jobs where older men literally screamed insults at me, and they never treated me worse (in the ways that truly mattered) than journalists did. When you have no true allies, you don’t feel good, and you’re not making the world any better, it’s time to leave. Seriously, fuck journalism in the USA.
If you’re like me, you eventually reached a point where you realized it was useless being polite and your entire week was spent dealing with people who were never going to give a fuck about you or anyone else beyond what you could give them, or what negative press you potentially threatened them with by existing.
Had a moment by the time I was close to resigning where I gave zero fucks. I remember a military recruiter calling and wanting a story in the local newspaper about how enlisting could help your life, etc., basically wanting free advertising. I took the memo off my desk in front of my editor and dumped it in the trash without saying anything while going back to my other work.
There’s one really decent guy I met in that industry who, ironically, I clashed with the most. But he turned out to be the most fucking human and just had his own issues he was working through. Most of the rest were just smiling, catty libs.
