Journalist Michael S. Malone says goodbye
There comes a time in life where you just burn out. I’m sure there are some who don’t, or they’re able to push through it. Journalist Michael S. Malone is hanging up his typewriter. He’s burned out.
That’s what I call it, and I’ve burned out many times. To me, it’s a point I reach where I feel I’m paddling upstream and going nowhere, that the work I do is futile, or worse, a waste of time.
Malone writes eloquently of his reasons for leaving the biz, and the bottom line is that he’s become disenchanted with journalism.
So, when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist,” you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.
Now, of course, there’s always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word “said” — muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. — to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.
But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.
But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.
That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can’t achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty — especially in ourselves.
I can genuinely feel the broken heart in Malone’s piece. I’ve felt it myself, and when you spend four years in college passionately learning the ropes, surrounded in an idealism that you’re going to change the world in a good way, it hurts to one day have it all smack you in the face. You realize a lot of it is pure bullshit.
I’ve always known the media is heavily biased to the left. But instead of a great conspiracy, I know it’s a result of one thing: the type of people who go into journalism. In my years at J School, I knew one token conservative, and we treated him like our pet. God bless him, he was gracious and put up with our taunts and continued to crank out good work. I was his editor at our campus daily paper.
How many super libs go into economics or business? I don’t know the answer, but I would guess righties outnumber lefties by a great margin. It’s the same thing in journalism; idealistic liberals who dream of the glory of Woodward and Bernstein see journalism as a noble occupation. Truth be told, it was also a lot of fun chasing that high of a good story. I often miss that high, and I don’t think all the cocaine in the world would come close.
It’s one thing when a (former) good journalist such as Dan Rather is sent to journalistic Siberia in a flame of shame. But it’s a sad day when a good journalist bids goodbye because journalism sucks and he’s grown weary of crap-covered fan letters.
What a loss.
