“I think the best definition of journalism is history as refracted through the prism of the unfolding present.”
There is a term for this, and it's "cant." It refers to jargon, often indecipherable, of a particular group. It’s often meaningless or totally obscure and is widely used to disguise the fact that the speaker is a charlatan who is trying to fool the rubes.
Hugh Hewitt interviewed Joe Rago who achieved fame by penning an editorial in the Wall Street Journal calling bloggers “The Blog Mob: Written By Fools To Be Read By Imbeciles”. Like the kind of person who guests on Jerry Springer’s show, Joe Rago revels in his 15 minutes of fame without the wit to know that he is exposing himself as a buffoon.
Dean Barnett makes this excellent point:
IT HAS TO BE FRUSTRATING for journalists that hordes of bankers,lawyers, professors and other anonymous shlubs can so easily crash their gate. It's probably still more galling that the gate crashing can only go one way. If the typical journalist said he wanted to give being a law professor a whirl, no matter how skilled he was at refracting history through the prism of the unfolding present, he would find no takers.
Neophytes can enter the previously sacred temple of journalism and go as far as their talent will take them. Other professions remain closed. A brain surgeon can go to Townhall.com and start a blog in five minutes. Journalists aren't allowed to perform brain surgery, unless there's a really crappy HMO out there that I'm not aware of.
1 comment:
Rago should be critical of institutional "old" media like the New York Times and others that have propagated garbage with passion for decades. I believe most people take the blog content with caution, while the old media is taken seriously. Serious consumers of any information will weigh everything with caution. I weighed in on this subject too at www.bizplusblog.com.
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