If you were to ask the average journalist what’s going wrong with their work, you’d get back a biblical list of plagues.
Low and stagnating pay, unstable employment, difficult career advancement, uncooperative subjects, sexists/racists/harassers bringing you down, an indifferent public, extractive Big Tech companies, clumsy or malign employers, AI-deluded management, endless waves of social media hucksters, so on. Getting a staff job is hard, making freelancing pay is hard, going solo in the creator economy is hard, a lot of the people who say they’re doing great are churning out crap, everything is hard. The signals scream to quit and move on if you don’t get laid off or forced out first.
Yet the journalist sticks with it and keeps slamming the like button on Poynter’s Friday meme dumps from TyLisa C. Johnson.1 Something in all this doesn’t add up. How there could be all this news happening and no one to cover it? It’s like that old poster from New American Movement in the 1970s:
Just look around: A housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs, there’s work to be done.
So ask yourself, what kind of world has work but no jobs.
Whereas, the journalist resolves: When there is all this journalism that needs to be done, there should be more journalists with more resources to do it.
Journalists and standpoint epistemology
That’s the labor analysis of what’s wrong with journalism, which can sometimes be totally distinct from, say, the management analysis, the academic analysis, the philanthropic analysis, the reformer analysis, the investor analysis, the tech analysis, the consumer analysis, the innovator analysis, and so on and so forth ad nauseam.
Everybody’s take on what’s happening with media is often strongly shaped by a personal perspective, which in philosophical jargon is called “standpoint epistemology.”
Journalism has been one of our most important practices for acknowledging and navigating conflicting standpoints in democratic societies, where a lot of people have unique insights but horrible blind spots and are reliably vulnerable to believing their own bullshit or failing to notice its existence.
The reporter is a bit like Socrates, running around the agora annoying people with questions; at the end of the process, a proper pile of decreasingly conflicting answers will add up to something resembling a useful truth. Or at least an accurate set of coordinates describing where social conflict is happening and where people stand.
Of course this is where I remind everybody that Athens made Socrates kill himself.
The journalist is their own blind spot
The rub for the labor analysis of journalism is that it starts with a vulnerable philosophical presumption, a big bias, which is that there is such a thing as a journalist and that there still should be such a thing as a journalist going forward. This is the journalist’s own critical blind spot, a belief in our own existence; our self-love.
Well, not every standpoint in media theorizing need believe that the journalist is the protagonist of the story or even necessarily has any part in the plot going forward. If subjects can reach the public via social media, do the subject really need the journalist anymore to get their viewpoint out there? If the publisher or consumer can collect a variety of viewpoints via AI crawling and synthesize them via chatbot, does the publisher or consumer really need the journalist to be the storyteller?
And so on. If journalism isn’t a job or an identity but a bundle of functions, those functions can be disaggregated and recreated through a variety of other means. Maybe you could even create something better (and cheaper) than what we had before.
Journalists and the theory of bullshit
But as I was attending the Strategic Labor Researchers Conference at UCLA this weekend, I was reminded of one of the epistemological tendencies that journalists and labor advocates have in common: a cantankerous belief that self-serving bullshit is one of the major ordering forces of society, and the importance of creating countervailing pressure against the oppressive presence of someone else’s bullshit, or multiple streams of bullshit, or a whole bullshit biome.
What is bullshit? Bullshit is when the hotel says you can skip housekeeping to help save the environment, when it’s really better at saving the hotel on housekeeper wages. Bullshit is when the prediction market advertisement says you can win! betting on major world events, while knowing that attracting money-losing suckers like you is the only thing keeping the whole casino in business.
Bullshit is self-interest disguising itself as something greater, a part that mistakes its interests for the interests of the whole.
To believe in bullshit’s ever-present existence is to have a somewhat skeptical view of the fallibility of people, though no more skeptical than the belief that self-interest is central to human nature, which is the driving principle of modern economies.
In this view, the bullshit generated by self-interest isn’t something spewed by the occasional bad actor. It’s something more like unlisted dark matter on the Table of Elements, exerting its own heavy gravity on everything.
“Calling bullshit” is the phrase we use for the dialectic that too much bullshit creates. For example: The boss says sales are down and there isn’t enough money for raises this year. Well, is that true? The problem isn’t that the workers didn’t hear the boss’ perspective but that they didn’t believe it. The workers unionize, point to executives’ pay and that big stock buyback, and conclude there’s plenty of money; they demand raises. Then comes management’s turn to accuse the workers of being delusional and irrational and so on.
In the end, every negotiation is a bullshit resolution session. So is every journalist’s reporting and fact-checking process.
The opportunity cost of losing a journalist job
Beyond the qualitative miseries of journalism, one of the journalist’s other blind spots tends to be how mathematics is ruining your life. One of the most important concepts in economics, with the stupidest possible name, is “opportunity cost.”
It’s like this: Whatever you’re doing right now, ask, “Is this the most productive use of my time?” Since you’re reading this newsletter, the answer is obviously yes. But even reading my magical words has a cost: You could instead be trading on the stock market, cooking supper, or falling in love with somebody right now. Except you aren’t. You’re doing this and not that. “Not that” is the opportunity cost. Sometimes you can even stick a dollar estimate on it.
Over the past two decades, our society has collectively decided that most people who are journalists have something better that they could be doing with their time. The opportunity cost of having so many journalists has become too great to bear. By some calculations, reporting on the latest meeting of the school board in Lee’s Summit, Mo., is a less economically productive use of time than doing PR for an AI company that was previously hoovering up that journalist’s work without compensation.
Of course, the communities resisting AI data centers everywhere think they’re calling bullshit on the big robot boxes being such a mathematically good thing, tax-wise, jobs-wise, energy-wise, water-wise. Is it true? Who’s doing the fact-finding, and whose “facts” are trusted enough to believe? The crusty third-party validators like journalists have been getting stripped away, and the local officials have been signed to NDAs. There are volleys of claim and rumor; there are allegations of misinformation.
There’s certainly some bullshit afoot. There’s more of it all the time.
As always, this newsletter represents my views and mine alone, however they are obviously correct.
Excellent piece. I worked for seven papers—Arcata Union, Madera Tribune, Oceanside Blade-Tribune, Longview Daily News up in Washington, LA Herald Examiner, LA Times and Sacramento Bee. Three no longer exist and the others are far from what they were when I worked at them. Real journalists’ work matters and is worth paying for.
There are so many incredible threads in this piece that are worth unpacking, but I just wanted to say thank you for shouting out me and my memes😭😭😭 journalists, to me, are among the groups most deserving of joy and levity right now!