If you don’t read PowerLine every day, you’re slighting your education. Take today, for example, and the wonderful piece by Scott Johnson, containing a longish letter from the wonderful William Katz, who among many other careers was an editor at the New York Times Magazine for a while. Katz bemoans the transformation of journalism into an instrument of indoctrination, rather than reportage and even helping good government. The new breed bring with them “the culture, attitudes, and arrogance of the academic world,” especially the elite journalism schools of the two coasts.
That leads Katz to remark
Just as Hollywood, in its hiring practices, has replaced talent with education, journalism is in danger of replacing experience with report cards. Journalism is not a profession. There is no specific body of knowledge required, and there is no licensing. What is needed is a sharp set of skills, high powers of observation, and a humility about how much we can understand quickly, and these come only from experience. But when you’ve gone through Yale or Stanford, when you’ve been told how smart you are, when you got 700s on your SATs, you start to believe what mom has whispered in your ear. You start to think that you “know.” It’s a kind of self-inflicted grade inflation. I’m bright, therefore I’m right.
The impact of this attitude has been profound. As reader Sparks said, there has been a separation between journalism and its audience, and I believe it derives directly from the separation between our universities and the nation. College graduates, especially from supposedly elite schools, see themselves as a class apart.
It’s worthwhile to remind ourselves that the “big idea” panaceas, when divorced from the rest of human activity, invariably lead us into a blind alley. “Education” was supposed to produce a more enlightened society, with more knowledgeable citizens, and thus better representatives, and thus better government. But, as it became increasingly separate from real life, as the ivory towers got higher and thicker, “education” produced citizens whose heads contained more theory than actual experience. Report cards-complete with grade inflation driven by the need for ‘self-esteem’ (code for narcissism)–became journalism’s SATs.
Removed from real competition, journalism has increasingly become politics, with the moral corruption that always flourishes among political classes. It can’t be an accident that phony journalism of the sort to which my old mag, The New Republic, has sadly fallen prey, seems to be increasing, in tandem with the new class of academics masquerading as reporters.
Read the whole thing. Please.
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