April 28, 2008
Taking on the Stuffed Shirts
Amy Gahran with Poynteronline vents at the attitudes of a certain ilk of "journalists" working for major broadcast and print organizations and the pomposity of their own self-congratulatory, but rapidly crumbling, vantage points.
These attitudes, Gahran asserts, are:
* The only journalism that counts is that done by mainstream news orgs, especially in print or broadcast form. Alternative, independent, online, collaborative, community, and other approaches to news are assumed to be inferior or even dangerous.
* Priesthood syndrome: Traditional journalists are the sole source of news that can and should be trusted -- which gives them a privileged and sacred role that society is ethically obligated to support.
* Journalists and journalism cannot survive without traditional news orgs, which offer the only reliable, ethical, and credible support for a journalistic career.
* Real journalists only do journalism. They don't dirty their hands or distract themselves with business and business models, learning new tools, building community, finding new approaches to defining and covering news, etc. As the Louisville Courier-Journal staffer Mark Schaver said just this morning on Twitter, "[Now] is not a good time [for journalists] if you don't want your journalism values infected with marketing values."
* Journalistic status and authority demands aloofness. This leads to myriad problems such as believing you're smarter than most people in your community; refusing to "compromise" yourself professionally by engaging in frank public conversation with your community; and using objectivity as an excuse to be uncaring, cynical, or disdainful.
* Good journalism doesn't change much. So if it is changing significantly, it must be dying. Which in turn means the world is in big trouble, and probably deserves what it will get.
Gahran makes piercingly valid points. There are plenty of journalists in the corporate media doing great work and many hone pioneering visions for their electronic future. There are also plenty who walk around in stuffed shirts as if they are on loan from God while ridiculing the upstarts -- especially when they get scooped. And, it's so amusing to see this later group fumbling their way into new forms of expression on the worldwide web and internet with the help of major corporate financing being spent with the abandon of Iraq contractors.
American journalists were once largely a "blue-collar" vocation full of crusaders eager to question the status quo. They are the ones with a legacy of mythic proportions: two-fisted drinkers, outcasts, clowns, iconoclasts and satirists. Today, many of those have been replaced with corporate ladder climbers.
She would have met up with many of those at the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday night.
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April 19, 2008
Embassy Construction Complete
And the manager of First Kuwaiti makes a rare public statement:
"This is a remarkable accomplishment for our company and for the thousands of individuals whose hard work has made it possible. We are proud of our record of achievement in Iraq and regard the completion of the new U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad as an absolute success."
He adds that the project would not have been possible without the active support of the Kuwait Government, which facilitated the immigration of workers for the project, and assisted greatly with the re-export of construction materials; exempted the import and export of materials from customs; and provided extraordinary facilities for the staging of shipments to Iraq.
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