A bad apple.

Now making the rounds of newsrooms:

"Let me just say that I'm always suspicious when I see articles about the motivations of journalists. I think they often reflect a misunderstanding of what journalism is all about. Journalists are supposed to be assholes. The system does not work, in fact, if society's journalists are all nice, kind, friendly, rational people. 

"You want a good percentage of them to be inconsolably crazy. You want them to be jealous of everything and everyone and to have heaps of personal hangups and flaws. That way they will always be motivated to punch holes in things."

--Matt Taibbi, journalist and blogger, Rolling Stone, 2009.

I know this guy.

Not personally, of course. But I've seen him at work in many newsrooms. He always files past deadline, because Hemingway would. He has spent the afternoon interrupting colleagues with gossip. He's a stylist, not a reporter; one interview and an unnamed source will do to hang the story on. He seduces your wife or girlfriend, who never again hears from him, because Sartre and de Beauvoir had an open marriage and that's a key to profound writing. Accuracy isn't a priority; we have deskers for that. He'll rage occasionally at sources, because Hunter Thompson did, and too bad those sources now won't talk to me. Of readers he is contemptuous. They're morons who lack the passion or wit to punch a hole in something from time to time. He thinks journalists should be assholes because he is one, and feels vindicated in this, believing he is Saving the World.

Folks like this are the reason journalists rank dead last or second to it in polls on vocations the public most respects - have done since I was a kid. Glad to say I've never met anyone remotely like him in our newsroom. Google "Taibbi Goldman Sachs" and see the high regard in which this specimen is held. He is what inspired A.J. Leibling to write: "Newspapering, despite urgent prodding from schools of journalism, has always lagged behind the learned professions on the march to seemliness."

Comments

[Wascally Wabbit]

But is it personal ethics that is wholly to blame, David, or the training they receive in J-School these days?
In much the same way, are the individual CEOs to blame for the mess in businesses, especially financial ones, or is that too largely a result of the wrong emphasis in B-Schools in the last 2 decades - aiming for short term (quarterly) gain over long term stability and growth?

[David Olive]

Hi WW
Great question, I'm biased of course. I frequently lecture at my alma mater, the Ryerson J-school, and have former colleagues among the faculty. The message is you'll never make in the profession without consistent adherence to high ethical standards, and that the work is collaborative. Blogging is about the closest one gets to single-handed journalism, which is why it's still regarded as glorified diarism in most quarters of the MSM. In print and broadcast, even books, the "content producer" is abetted by editors, producers, directors, illustrators, photographers, fact-checkers, copy editors - to say nothing of the engineers we employed full-time at the Globe in the 1980s to fix the presses immediately should something break down. The lone ranger image persists, though, two decades after journalists ceased to be cigar-chopping alkies, if a majority ever were. Wander through our newsroom and it's ever bit as quiet and organized as an insurance company's steno pool - back when they had steno pools. The downside is we don't have the same fire in the belly as of old - it's there, but not to the same crusading degree, or the compulsion to beat a competition that no longer exists in N.A.'s one-paper towns.
My first book was on corporate ethics, and I had a chapter on the introduction at the time of mandatory ethics programs. Many of the folks we're talking about who took the global financial system on a Daytona 500 spin pre-date that era. I think the B-schools do try to teach that individual actions have consequences for the group, and the entire organization.
Having said that, ethics is but one course at Dartmouth, Wharton, Harvard, Rotman and Schulich. An MBA student is overwhelmed by sterile quant work - especially in all-important Finance. This applies also to IT and engineering students, though the latter - unlike journalists and biz grads - take a professional oath to conduct themselves ethically. Which is why journalism and business are not genuine professions, like medicine, law, engineering, architecture, accounting, where you are obliged to take and live by a code of ethics, a breach of which will get your license to practice removed. I've been doing journalism for 30 years without a licence, which is a luxury (?) even a real estate agent doesn't enjoy.
Certainly there is a B-school emphasis on goal-setting and thorough, informed speculation on ideal methods of achieving goals. The problem is that since the world doesn't put a price on "social costs" like pollution, traffic congestion, depletion of resources, workplace safety deaths and injuries, neither does B-school.
The undeniable pressure for short-term results one learns mostly in the workplace, not in B-school. Peer pressure suffices. You look around and those doing well - biggest bonuses, most rapid trip up the promotion ladder - are the ones who've delivered promptly on something that is a priority for the organization, be it profit or getting a new factory running sooner than usual, or a well-executed marketing campaign. That some of this haste might eventually backfire is not something you hear much about in the organizational environment - whether a business, government ministry, art museum. Few things are more commonplace than the high-ranking executive who has left some wreckage behind, the disaster not blooming until he or she is long departed. Obviously this should be taught, but since organizations don't seek it in recruits, there's little incentive for schools to more than hint at it.
J-school does teach you the price of libel, plagiarism, inaccuracy, fiction passed off as fact (Jason Blair), failing to protect sources whom you have promised anonymity, and writing that is gratuitiously hurtful. As with doctors, a journalist must be thinking if what he or she is writing will cause injury. ("First, do no harm.")
Sorry for the long reply. Cheers for now, David