Trump's Chumps: The Fourth Estate, but last in the hearts of their countrymen.

Among the many offenses that modern architecture has committed against Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington—America's main street, we like to call it—is a glass 'n' stone 'n' steel box that houses a museum about news gathering called, unfortunately, the Newseum. Funded by the New York Times, Hearst, ABC News, Comcast, CBS News, Time Warner, and every worthy journalism nonprofit in the land, the Newseum is the establishment press's monument to itself—a mirror into which every mainstream reporter and editor can peer with an admiring gaze.

From the front of the building hangs a five-story-high sheet of marble inscribed with the First Amendment, in letters that are easily as tall as an early hominid. You can't miss it. You're not supposed to miss it. The display reflects the premise of the museum: that the "free press" mentioned in and protected by the Constitution is identical to the kind of corporate entities that paid for the museum.

It's a silly conceit, and only a business as powerful and unavoidable as national journalism could get away with it for so long. But has the journalistic establishment at last met its match in the buffoonish figure of Donald Trump? Consciously or not, Trump has used the interregnum between Election Day and Inauguration Day to subvert and, in some cases, even deal a death blow to many of the standard conventions of political journalism....

Back when I was a reporter, I remember getting press kits for the Newseum.

I thought at the time “these big-time journalists really want to build monuments to themselves.”

The problem with the media goes deeper than its Leftist bias — yes, I know that will be a revelation to many FReepers, but stay with me for a bit.

The ultimate corruption in the media is that nobody wants to do the hard work of putting out a newspaper or broadcast.
Call it “narcissism?” I’m not sure, but it’s a pervasive problem.

I spent 25 years in the biz, never made it to a major metro daily. You might say my career topped out at AA ball.

All these big-time reporters and editors want to be columnists, they want to be editorial writers, they want to hobnob with celebrities, they ultimately want to be celebrities themselves.

What nobody seems to want to do is cover the local school board meeting, or zoning board, or water and sewer authority, you name it.

But these are your first stops when you go looking for local news. They aren’t your only stops, but you’ve got to do the grunt work if you want to get the story.

Just as our president-elect is the “Blue-Collar Billionaire,” the media will only regain its credibility when it adopts a blue-collar attitude toward its work.

I spent 25 years as a word mechanic, a simple purveyor of information and maybe a little entertainment. It was never my job to “change the world” as so many journalism majors have been quoted as saying.

Actually, many of the old-school editors I worked with laughed at the pretensions of j-school grads. Of course, those old-school editors are now retired or passed away.
These old-school editors weren’t necessarily conservative, but they did have professional standards.

Today, I’m happily retired. It was a crazy business, and I don’t stay in touch with old colleagues — there isn’t any real friendship in a newsroom. How can real friendship happen among a group of self-promoters?

But I will say that I got to see a lot of things — especially factories and farms — that I never would have seen in any other business. Met a lot of interesting people too, and hopefully did right by them in my stories.

“I spent 25 years in the biz, never made it to a major metro daily. You might say my career topped out at AA ball.” “It was never my job to “change the world” as so many journalism majors have been quoted as saying.”

I'll bet you were a much better journalist than those who did wind up at the bigger newspapers. I have a friend, and family who spent time in the industry, and their experience was that it became more and more cut-throat and political as you move up the ‘ladder’. What that says to me is that the industry self-selects for the most cut-throat narcissistic people as you move to bigger newspapers (same in broadcast news). Your comment about journalism graduates envisioning ‘changing the world’ (i.e. make or be the news, not just report it) indicates the degree of narcissism in the starting pool. This is hardly unique to journalism, but suffice it to say that the cream does not routinely rise to the top - particularly in industries in which performance is subjective and not decided by hard criteria.

I gave up on them in the middle 1980s. I worked for a small newspaper as a writer and photographer and I also took pictures for the school newspaper. They sent us to a show at the school’s student center. It was the Lipizzaner Stallions.

I shot three rolls of film of horses performing all kinds of acrobatic stunts with their riders and the student reporter sat next to me, mute. I already knew that one of the best benefits of a press pass was the opportunity to meet who were otherwise out of reach. I said we should go talk to the riders and staff when the show ended.

“What for?”

“So we can ask them questions and put their answers in the story you’re going to write.”

“I already wrote the story.”

Yep. This was a college journalism student who paraphrased their press release and claimed she wrote a newspaper article. The tv and radio students were even worse.

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