Professional Journalism

Heading West.

A question inspired by Candy Crowley's mismanagement of the second US Presidential debate: why has journalism grown so bad, and so corrupt? What caused this?

For many years, I had the strong sense that newspapers and newsmagazines in general had tumbled far downhill since my youth. But I could not be sure. It might have had to do with the more jaded eyes of age. But now, with the Internet, there can be no doubt: the amateurs in the blogosphere do far better than the professionals.

And that last word may tell the whole story. I think it was a terrible error to turn journalism, during my own lifetime, into a “profession.” Journalists just a little older than I tended to have only a high school education, if that—they got into journalism because they could do it, because they could write, and tell a story interestingly. Now they get into the profession not because they can write, but because they have taken the required courses. The same awful process has also, over about the same time period, destroyed the teaching profession.

There is a basic principle here that is too often overlooked. Whenever you introduce standards to any area, you are eliminating two things: the bottom, the substandard, but also the top, the exceptionally good. That is the essence of professionalism: standardization—in other words, conformity. It is fine in areas in which simple competence is sufficient for all or most purposes--technical areas. But in areas, like writing or teaching,that require some element of creativity in order to work at all, it is going to damage, and ultimately destroy, the field.

The single obvious reason why the US dominates the contemporary world, culturally, technologically, and politically, is because of its tradition of nonconformity—aka “rugged individualism'” if you like. Those who found the local society too constraining in its demands could always escape to the frontier; and the doctrines of individual liberty on which the country was founded reduced the demands of conformity in the first place. There was also always the sense that this was the “New World,” which need not ever be constrained by the habits of the old.

The same secret led to the strength of Britain. On top of a strong innate social tolerance for, indeed glorification of, eccentricity, robustly expressed by John Stuart Mill, Britons needing breathing room could always take to the sea, and long had the ready option of shipping out to the Empire. There is nothing like the expatriate existence for freeing oneself from social pressures.

Sailing Before the Wind: The Jeanie Johnston.

This alone ensures that professionalization will be a disaster in most instances. On top of this, the creation of a profession creates a group consciousness, and a sense of common interests. This is not good. As Adam Smith observed, you cannot expect a group of people in the same trade gathered together, even for recreation, not to immediately turn to ways to conspire against the public interest for their own benefit. That is what a profession does, perfectly—a thing we would hold illegal in the corporate world. Now journalists all come up through the same schools, have many friends on rival papers, and attend the same parties, on top of their inevitable time together in the newsroom. They are a clique. Membership in the clique comes to be based not on ability, but on reliable commitment to the interests of the clique.

Fortunately, just when everything seemed to be going Stalinist, the innate rebellious genius of the Anglosphere created a new frontier: cyberspace. We have the bloggers, now, and the online educators, shaming and exposing the cliques and recovering the option of excellence. It is no accident this all first came from California, the last post on the Westward march; and, in the case of the WWW, from a Briton who had opted to live abroad.