On the Culture of Journalism

Tom, who clearly has been eating his vegetables and getting plenty of sleep, has another great post over at Big Tent. I am going to bet that my copyright lawyer is better than his copyright lawyer and excerpt his piece in full:

A note: this entry really isn’t about me. Really. It's about the punditocracy taking themselves very seriously, and who are taken seriously by others. So stick with it.

This is something I think about quite a bit; it's something about which Derek and I have commiserated many times. Those occasions have usually been triggered by the odd tendency among our journalistic friends, the opinion manufacturers at prominent and not-so-prominent websites, magazines, and newspapers, to ignore, utterly ignore, anything we send them for consideration. Derek and I both hold Ph.D.s; we both have been published in a number of formats. We're reasonably well-informed individuals who write reasonably well. And we can’t even get an acknowledgement of receipt for an op-ed to, say, any mid-level newspaper in the continental United States. Mind you, we’re not necessarily asking for a comment on the op-ed, let alone a clear decision on whether they will try to publish. All we want, for now, is for some sort of proof of life for our baby—evidence that it arrived in one piece. This is frustrating, because for the few minutes out of the day when we’re not talking about shotgunning beer and tossing midgets, we are serious people who want to be taken seriously.

Now look at the list of columns at Townhall.com. Most days I peruse this list, read two or three of the columns, maybe link one, and ignore the rest. The same goes for Real Clear Politics. Townhall and RCP are more conservative sites, but the same could go for any list of daily or weekly columns. For a variety of reasons, most opinion pieces by established opinion writers simply aren’t very good. Maybe they have been at it for so long that they feel like everything is a repetition. Maybe they lose clarity in their pursuit of the clever turn of phrase. Maybe they just don’t have anything new or different or interesting to say about the issues of the day.

Look, writing a column is not shoveling coal or plowing fields or anything like that, but it can’t be easy, especially over the long term. So I am more than willing to cut columnists some slack for writing boring pieces, especially when the columnists are older. I assume, perhaps out of naivete, that established columnists did hard work back in the day to earn their relatively comfortable current jobs. No doubt that is the case for many of them.

But I wonder. Folks like Ben Shapiro, Megan Basham, and Ross Douthat make me wonder. Stephen Glass gives me, and should have given everyone, pause. I'm a big fan of Jonah Goldberg, and he obviously was in the midst of a productive career when he got his big break, but it is worth noting that his current position stemmed from the notoriety that came from his mom telling Linda Tripp to record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky. Obviously, and as with anything, there is quite a bit of luck and who you know in entering the land of the pundits.

This sounds petty, and truthfully there is no small amount of sour grapes to what I've written. I would love to know the right people. A little luck wouldn't be bad either. But--here's where it gets interesting, maybe--who the hell am I to tell people what to think about the most important issues facing the world today?

Sure, I have a Ph.D. And I am certainly an expert in my areas of study and research. That means a lot, but I am also well aware that my degrees did not bring unlimited knowledge. In fact, one of the most important lessons I learned in graduate school was just how little I knew and know. On the practical side, the everyday life stuff, I'm married with kids, I've got a house, and I've lived and traveled and worked all over the country. I still feel like I haven't experienced anything. And I seriously doubt that there will ever come a time when I'll wake up and my education sand experiences will have combined to reach the level where I'll feel like I've got it all figured out. But I could be wrong.

So I wonder sometimes about the authority with which younger pundits, especially those in my age range, speak. Again, I'm only going after conservative types here, but what did Ben Shapiro pick up at UCLA and Harvard Law that I do not know about to give him the confidence to assert unequivocally that Israel's ceasefire with Hezbollah was "the most ignominious defeat in Israeli history"? Did something in Meghan Basham's personal experiences or education at Arizona State give her the confidence to be so sure that the movie Old School was an assault on the institution of marriage? Is a Harvard undergraduate degree so thorough that Ross Douthat can so blithely judge the approaches of two popes to Christian morality in the modern world? Does Tom Bruscino really think that reading about events on computer screens in Ohio, Washington D.C., and Kansas gives him the wisdom to insist that we are winning the war in Iraq?

Obviously speaking with authority is part of the game--people will only pay attention if you sound like you know what you are talking about. That said, I can only speak for myself, but no matter what happens and no matter where my work gets published and no matter how much authority with which I seem to speak, I want to make one thing very clear: I am always well aware that I could be wrong.

No education, no experiences, and no age will ever give me absolute authority. Just a humble call to remember humility when bouncing around the opinion world.

Tom hits a lot of salient points here. I don't think it embraces false humility to say that his last point is an important one even if on this blog and in a host of opinion pieces I have written the nature of the game is that you have to take on an aura of authority. Certainly I come across as cocky and worse, but I still think it is worth pointing out that knowing what you do not know is profoundly important. One of the aspects I really like about blogging is that you tend to cite sources a lot. For every time you spout off there are others when you either use evidence from someone who might know more to bolster your opinion or else you simply link to something and say this made me think, or this guy seems to be on to something. It should come as no surprise that so many academics have taken to blogging, because blogs require a certain fealty to sources.

But there is a flip side to this, and that is that while we have to be humble in the face of all that we do not know, there also seems to be a culture within the profession of journalism that hates blogs not for the reason they assert -- that it is not "real" journalism and that anyone can say anything, both of which can be true -- but for quite a different reason: Because journalists are rarely experts in any particular area. That sort of generalism serves them well in many ways, but it also means that some anonymous blogger, or not so anonymous blogger, can call them out at any time. It is a nice trope for them to perpetuate that bloggers are cavalier and unqualified. Their real fear seems to be that quite anumber of bloggers are fastidious and very qualified and they write well.

Tom and I are encountering another aspect of journalism culture that we have found distasteful. As he mentions in his post, we have written an op-ed that we believe makes some worthy points that need to be made. We have both read it quite a lot and criticized it as often, and so we know it is well written. We see what passes for columns and op-ed pieces in dozens of newspapers and magazines and websites across the country. We have probably emailed this piece to three dozen places, liberal and conservative, big and small, newspapers and online journals. We can count on one hand the number of responses we have gotten one way or the other, and none of those followed through and gave us so much as an indication as to whether they liked or disliked the piece. This points to another element of a lack of humility on the part of journalists: the arrogance of simply ignoring people who, even if the piece we submitted was not perfect for the venue, know their topic, know their material, and can write. We both have PhDs and we both can list publications in both academic and non-academic fora. I have published several op-eds. We worked hard on a piece that is especially relevant to a couple of major issues facing the world today. And in some of the places to which we have submitted the article we penned, we have since read absolute tripe.

Tom and I were talking earlier about another aspect of his post. It seems that in some places a good old boys network has yielded right of way to a good young boys and girls network. Tom mentions several conservative examples. There are as many liberal cases. I do not begrudge these people their success. But I do have to wonder about a process of anointing people with an aura that maybe they have not quite earned. I am not saying that I have yet either. In most ways I have not. But given some of the stuff I read on a daily basis, I'm pretty sure that two young PhD's who write an op-ed and send it along deserve at least the courtesy of a personal response even if we are not ensconsed within that inner sanctum that journalists create for themselves.