On the Conservatism of Journalists

In considering the politics of artists and how they are not necessarily what people expect them to be I have found myself also thinking of the politics of journalists--another group stereotyped as Establishment-bucking "liberals" who in fact produce a very conservative product. In his exposé The Brass Check Upton Sinclair stressed the extent to which journalists went about this work in a cynical and increasingly demoralized way amid the very real compulsions of their business. Still, that hardly seems the case with every journalist, especially in an era in which the field is so glamorized. Indeed, just as with artists I can picture a host of factors impelling would-be journalists toward conservative attitudes, especially at the more elite levels of the occupation, even apart from what they are required to do by a Fourth Estate that is, in practice, a Big Business pressed by innumerable political factors to stay on the right side of the powerful, which does not hire, does not keep employed, does not promote to positions of responsibility, those it does not trust to conform to its standards.

There is the general upper-classness of those who are likely to have access to the educational credentialing while being in a position to brave the low starting salaries in that career.

There is the "professionalization" of journalism, which gives their field a rather conservative ethos, just as it does all professional fields. (The evocation of a priesthood by the word "professional" is not unimportant.)

There is their contact with an elite, which often dazzles them--not least in its "show business for ugly people" form, as they identify upward and imagine themselves up on society's commanding heights with the people they write about, and even becoming one of them (up until they learn the hard way that they are not really members of the club).

And there is the fact that journalists so often see themselves as "storytellers," offering narrative rather than analysis--a tendency to which I suppose they are the more susceptible in that so many of those who do become journalists have literary aspirations, as the attempts at "color" in the nonfiction books they write all too clearly show.

Alas, the articles-puffed-up-into-books they tend to produce rarely show much sign of promise in that field.