The Courtiers and the Peasants

Journalists, like the artists they so often resemble in many ways, and are often aspiring to be, are a highly impressionable bunch particularly susceptible to being in awe of those who have wealth and power. Thus when they, for example, refer to some Global Fortune 500 CEO as a "Sun King" or somesuch, they do so not with the irony of the wise at the pretensions of a figure all too apt to be revealed as a fool, fraud and criminal, or a democratic disgust at elite vaingloriousness, but the awe of courtiers contesting for the honor of holding the Sun King's chamber pot (if not rendering more intimate service still) in the belief that the King really is God's appointed on Earth, that their proximity to such glory makes them glorious--and the combination of cynical awareness that sucking up to such gets one ahead with the complete lack of dignity that permits them to go about the task wholeheartedly.

However, the general public does not necessarily share the artist's sentiments, or have much respect for those who do hold them--perhaps the more in as they have so often been led to believe that the journalist is a Tribune of the People, rather than a Courtier to the Kings making their lives miserable, and feel continually betrayed in the process.