Shearer: What is a Journalist?
Following up on the poll earlier this week about who/what is a journalist, the Huffington Post’s media writer, Harry Shearer, lets loose on journalism:
A journalist spends too much time covering a story that gets too little space so it can be skimmed by a reader who has too little time.
Journalists can’t resist: miracle puppies. children trapped in wells. killer bees.
Journalists almost always resist: stories with three or more sides, computer terminals without a Nexis account, angles that might make their colleagues think they were flaky.
A journalist will fly halfway around the world to stand where a tsunami took place, and he’ll stand in freezing rain for two hours to point out that it’s wintertime.
What is a journalist? A journalist is someone who earned pretty good money telling us what was really going on in the world, until he realized he could earn better money by telling us about the social lives of the people who earn really great money telling us fairy tales about the world.
A few of D.C.’s best will recognize themselves a little too well in some of Shearer’s characterizations. Although Wonkette might offer the best look-in-the-mirror: “A journalist will always buy the ‘next’ round.”
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Nadine Cheung
Editor, The Job Post
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