The Scourge of Baltimore

As truth-tellers, journalists remain the undocumented aliens of the knowledge industry, operating in an off-the-books epistemological economy apart from philosophers and scientists on one side and "creative" writers on the other. We expect philosophers and scientists to argue and prove their claims or die trying. We declare that poets, novelists and playwrights can stage life's truths rather than demonstrate them. When geniuses do either, insights spurt at point of impact, like blood at the bullet's point of entry.

But journalists? It's confusing. To demand that they perform elevated forensic tasks while conveying the news smacks of capitalist exploitation of workers, schoolmarmish control-freakism, abuse of second-rate minds. If journalists wanted to be scientists or philosophers, they'd have stayed in grad school--or accumulated stronger grade-point averages. Yet venturing too far into artistic license still gets your ass canned.

Reporters and editors for respectable outfits keep to modest standards of accuracy, of real sources and confirmable facts, on pain of being humiliated on Romenesko's MediaNews, boldfaced and multiply linked. The other part of the field offers full-time gasbags--decorous synonyms include "pundit," "commentator" and "analyst," commoner ones "jerkoid," "screamer" and "culture critic." They grab cable and syndicated-column jobs, lifetime employment no matter how many facts they screw up, so long as they don't piss off public taste (no actionable racism, anti-Semitism or pedophilia) or their ideologically sensitive employers ("If we're paying you to talk left, Botox-brain, don't mess us up by talking right, or going middle of the road").

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