I'm particularly angry at journalists these days. I think for the first time I am starting to really feel the kind of animosity that must energize certain bloggers. I am angry at journalists because they are leveraged by stupidity, and because they are particularly arrogant.
It's probably not fair that I listen to NPR only on the weekends when this is in evidence most clearly. There is nothing so indicative of the kind of thing that gets under my fingernails as the smarmy cocksure baloney that oozes from Wait Wait Dont Tell Me. But even more, I fell into a portion of a radio drama about the heroics, the heroics mind you, of the journalists breaking the Pentagon Papers story.
Journalists are this and rarely anything more. They are intermediaries who are mass-articulate who are paid to find people who are too busy actually producing work of intrinsic interest to be mass-articulate themselves. Mass-articulation may or may not be a skill. It seems to me that a halfway decent education would obviate the need for such proxies as the overwhelming majority of journalists are. But with any luck they'll all get disintermediated by a panoply of Google-able cloud-bots. If everyone had their own amanuensis and website, we wouldn't need journalists at all. Until that day we are stuck with their effluent. I am part of the transition. The 'sphere is part of the transition. God please let it be quick.
It is only under the influence of great storytelling that one recognizes how much of what passes for useful information is mindless dreck. I don't know what to do with my intolerance but rant today against journalists who haven't the cojones to establish certifications in their industry and yet complain about the information that wants to be free.
I continue to lament this problem of information theory. I am ready to throw up my hands. There is only a very narrow augmented path. The freedom of the press is constantly invoked and the role of the press is forgotten.
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