An interesting exchange in Kurtz’s chat today:
Hobnob with the big shots: As to upwardly mobile journalists hobnobbing with the bigshots, do you think Cronkite would have ever danced around a stage “rapping” with Karl Rove? I have seen some celebrity journalists roll their eyes when mentioning issues like making the tax system more progressive or getting us middle class types out of the health-care death spiral. I can’t possibly think this stuff comes our way unbiased and unfiltered. And while I completely and utterly concede that most journalists are likely very liberal when it comes to social issues like gay rights, it seems they are also more conservative in a self-interested sense, in terms of tax/health/fiscal policy. This is just how things work when we get our news from celebrity journalists making upper 6 and 7 figure incomes.
Howard Kurtz: Well, what’s the solution? Salary caps for journalists?
Look, let’s not put Cronkite on a pedestal. He was very well paid, even though he served before the era of multimillion-dollar salaries. He knew all the big-time politicians, and all the NASA officials and astronauts that he covered. He spent his spare time on Martha’s Vineyard and was hardly averse to socializing.
As for average reporters, a half-century ago many were high school graduates who hit the bar after work and were pretty friendly with the cops they covered. Journalism was a working-class profession. Today, many reporters make upper-middle-class salaries, but they also have advanced degrees and more specialized knowledge of their subject areas. So there is a tradeoff.
The salary caps will come when the papers are turned into nonprofits anyway. And I do find it interesting that we always hear about how much money national new orgs lose, but no one talks about cutting salaries (I realize they couldn’t go any lower at regional papers, but they sure could at the Post and Times, let alone on national tv). Of course when auto companies lose money, it’s all because the workers get paid too much. It’s hard not to see a double standard at a certain point.
The stuff about advanced degrees and specialized knowledge troubles me. It’s not true about specialized knowledge, as far as I can tell, and the talk about advanced degrees (which aren’t at all necessary for being a good reporter) makes me think that a lot of professional degrees do nothing other than the fill the degree-holder with an unwarranted sense of entitlement.
Update. To be totally clear, I agree with this:
I don’t think its the “average reporters” who are in a working class occupation that are the problem. I don’t want to throw things at the guys and gals that work at my home town paper.
The local reporters I know are hard-working and sharp. And I don’t think they get paid much.
But I am willing to include a lot of Posties and Timesmen in my condemnation here.
El Cruzado
Why, ALL professional degrees do nothing other than fill the degree-holder with an unwarranted sense of entitlement.
Except mine, of course.
Still, I can’t find the logic in those statements. It either means I’m very stupid or the guy’s spouting bullshit. And I don’t think I’m THAT stupid.
Dennis-SGMM
Those advanced degrees and that specialized knowledge must really come in handy when the TV journos are busy touting their networks’ shows during the news. I remember how impressed I was by the insights that were delivered during the Chandra Levy coverage not to mention the intellect displayed after Anna Nicole Smith’s death.
gbear
They know how to locate the kissable ass of power with their eyes closed.
Bertie Wooster
“Advanced degrees” and specialized knowledge” said in reference to journalism have the same vomit-in-the-back-of-the-mouth effect as “financial innovation” said in reference to Goldman et al.
@Dennis – well said. Or asking Scott Ritter if he’d “drunk Saddam’s kool-aid” (was that Cokie Roberts?). Or “Mr. President, in this time of impending war, how does your faith guide you”?
Elite journalism school at our service.
RandomChick
I don’t think its the “average reporters” who are in a working class occupation that are the problem. I don’t want to throw things at the guys and gals that work at my home town paper.
The big-time talking heads and op-ed sages, on the other hand . . .
zmulls
Kurtz makes the very point I have been making for years, to anyone who will listen (damn few, let me tell you).
When reporting was a working class, blue collar profession, the point was to cut down the “big boys” — they were the little guys going after the suits. Now it’s a white collar profession, and they are defending the suits against the dirty fingernailed working class.
As for education coming into it, it’s ironic. Journalism used to require an ability to read and write. Now, it’s all about Q rating. Successful “journalism” is not about getting it right, it’s about making it interesting. Someone with an ability to gab, with an interesting personality (either appealing, or contrarian in just the right way) will succeed at journalism. So, these more-educated fops are giving less educated content.
They’re not smarter now — they’re shallower and richer and more entitled.
And they have more to lose.
cleek
advanced degrees? in what, sycophancy ?
Mnemosyne
The Los Angeles Times would not hire reporters who did not have a master’s degree in journalism. That tells you a lot about that paper.
Dork
Apparently, their “subject areas” are cock-sucking and nut-fondling, b/c from the looks of the WaPo editorial page, their expertise in these areas are unparalleled.
jl
From what I have read from Wikipedia, a lot of the news celebs have advanced degrees as like Masters in Journalism and Polisci at most. That is OK, but not sure it is better than actually working a real beat for awhile. A lot of them started their careers as political flacks and gofers. Most of the younger ones have spent their entire careers in TV. I think Kurz is BSing too.
Cronkite was a human and he made mistakes was pretty establishment except when egregiousness of a situation beat him over the head, and he had his biases. But there is no comparison to what we have today. He did real beat work covering WWII industrial production beat and combat, sort of like the real reporters today the scruffy ones (well, except for Laura Logan) who stay in theater rather than fly in for celebrity weekend. Cronkite worked for print and radio as well as TV.
Go down the list of celeb newsies today and read their bios in Wikipedia and see if you agree.
PS: the problem is not so much background, as what kind of cultures you experienced. From what I have read, most of the news celebs today grew up entirely in a quarterly profit, ratings race, BS corporate entertainment environment. They have always been corporate company people, and that is all they know. And, that environment creates a filtering process, if you get my drift.
NutellaonToast
I certainly don’t know the numbers, but I have a hard time believing that lowering salaries would put them anywhere near solvent. Has anyone taken a look at this and done the math?
Jonny Scrum-half
I graduated with a journalism degree from a top-level journalism school, although I have never worked in journalism. My recollection is that my classmates weren’t too good with the numbers, and my classes gave me no specialized knowledge about anything. The only “specialized knowledge” most journalists need they can get from (a) reading lots of source material, and (b) keeping an open and inquiring mind.
The level of defensiveness that journalists exhibit about their own profession is remarkable, especially when one considers that they like to think of themselves as “watchdogs” for various other industries and, of course, for government.
Most of the media really are a joke, and they don’t even know it.
Shinobi
I have very serious doubts that more than 1% of journalists have a degree in something outside of the liberal arts. If journalists have specialized degrees in their subject matter, well, our schools are more fucked than we thought.
DougJ
I certainly don’t know the numbers, but I have a hard time believing that lowering salaries would put them anywhere near solvent. Has anyone taken a look at this and done the math?
No. I suspect you’re right. And I suspect it’s true of the auto industry too.
ironranger
“Advanced degrees” & “specialized knowledge” aren’t worth much if one hasn’t gotten experience from the ground up. How many of these very well paid so-called journos have spent any time being small town reporters? Car manufacturer and bank ceos would be better managers if they had to intern as bank tellers or detailing cars in a dealership & worked their way up.
I don’t see much if any “specialized knowledge” of this country outside of their cozy bubbles in the msm. That term must mean something different in their world.
Keith G
Howie misses it. Its not what Cronkite did in his personal time; it what he did when he was on the clock.
Comrade Jake
@cleek:
I believe David Gregory has a doctorate in “tire swinging”.
Dennis-SGMM
It’s also more than passing strange that all of these smart people unquestioningly accepted every one of Bush’s claims in the run up to the Iraq war. Remember the drone aircraft, the Nigerian yellowcake, the missiles that could strike Europe in less than forty-five minutes, the chemical weapons trucks, the smoking gun that was a nuclear bomb, etc., etc.?
An ass-kissing, greedy tool with an advanced degree is still an ass-kissing, greedy tool.
The next-to-last samurai
Educated fools have destroyed what was once a great nation. This is a matter of considerable concern to me as the problem grows steadily worse. Also–Signposts, doctor, now!
jenniebee
Everybody in every income group other than mine is wasteful and greedy and ruining the economy by demanding outrageous salaries.
My income group, on the other hand, is strapped for cash and fully financially committed on absolute necessities, and it would be unreasonable to suggest raising our financial burden with all those other Lucky Duckies out there.
DougJ
Reminds me of one of my favorite Atrios posts:
Bertie Wooster
And remember the breathless updates about the “Deck of Cards”?
Advanced degrees in credulity?
JGabriel
Howie Kurtz:
… a liberal.
I mean, you’d never hear Howie say:
.
Dennis-SGMM
@Bertie Wooster:
That was at the same time as the substance-free cheerleading from embedded (As in “embedded in the asses of the administration”) reporters. No one told the journos that their card was The King of Dicks.
The Grand Panjandrum
What kind of special knowledge does a Villager need? Don’t you have to read the Constitution in High School? A fucking private in the Army has a pretty good idea of how an M-16 operates. This “special knowledge” you speak of Howie, does not mean what you think it means. Understanding large deviation properties of certain stochastic PDE’s requires some “special knowledge.” To understand the poltical swamp in DC it requires one to possess average intelligence and the ability to overcome the gag reflex while fellating your source. That falls under “special skills” rather than “special knowledge” though, dunnit?
Elizabelle
More from the Kurtz “discussion” today. You can’t make this stuff up:
question from Green Bay: … Do the high salaries of top TV anchors damage the connection with the public that Cronkite seemed to have?
Howard Kurtz: I don’t fully know. Katie Couric may make $15 million a year, but she grew up in a middle-class family in Arlington. Brian Williams was once a volunteer fireman. ….
====
question entitled The Most Trusted Man: Is there any soul searching at the nets in an era where America’s most trusted journalist is Jon Stewart?
Howard Kurtz: Yeah – everyone’s trying to be funnier. Why do you think Brian Williams hosted Saturday Night Live?
Being a little facetious but you get my point.
========
And Kurtz’s point was ????
Read the entire discussion. Kurtz either won’t get or won’t respond to many of the questions.
Obtuse, yes. Intended? Not sure ….
ZachPruckowski
I haven’t seen many news stories where it was clear that the person having a degree in a field helped them much, at least in major, general-purpose news. I’d buy that editors at New England Journal of Medicine are helped by having a biology minor or by having been pre-med, but I don’t know what’s conveyed in news stories about politics and government that wasn’t straightforward from a high school Civics class. And perversely, it’s the specialized journalists that organizations like CNN are cutting.
My bottom line is that it’s starting to feel like journalists don’t really investigate any more. I look at the front page, and it feels like everything there is there because it came from a press release, or a comment from someone promoting themselves or their organization. I don’t see Watergate being broken by someone who’s idea of journalism is “Hey, DNC? The Republicans just said this. Would you like to respond?”
Zifnab
Depends on your local paper, and your local journalists. My native Houston Chronicle went into a pissing contest with the late great Houston Post about ten or fifteen years ago. The Post was the “liberal” paper of note, because it didn’t spend enough time questioning whether Governor Richards was a lesbian or give enough editorial space to Reagen retreads.
You don’t have to be based in NYC or DC to sell out.
The best paper I ever read was my college newspaper the Daily Texan. It’s hard to find a good news source today. *sigh* *grumble* *bitch* *moan*
JGabriel
ZachPruckowski:
It’s a sad commentary that, in fact, this is how Bob Woodward works nowadays.
.
ed
So Howie thinks that Cronkite would have totally danced with Rovesputin (and been aghast that rude Stephen Colbert).
Glad we got that cleared up.
Elizabelle
From Kurtz’s response to “Richmond VA” question re journalists cozying up to Mark Sanford and whether they’re losing objectivity because of personal relationships:
Kurtz: … As journalists have become more affluent — a trend to which I don’t necessarily object — they are more likely to hobnob with the big shots, send their kids to the same private schools, and hang out at the same parties. This undoubtedly affects their view of the world and the people they cover.
======
I think this is a real, real problem. Because too many network journalists and writers with major dailies (NYT, WaPost) and talking heads from think tanks just don’t get the world most of the rest of us live in. And they repeat or set a lot of the agenda.
Example: David Brooks is a very smart and likeable guy.
When he doesn’t get it, which is pretty often, he has no idea how far off the mark he is. (Recall his praising the affluent for working so hard and being so enterprising, when laid off engineers, etc. are laying around. He had NO CLUE how being economically displaced affects one’s psyche. Never entered his commentary.)
Sister Machine Gun of Mild Harmony
My impression (and I have a science/math degree) is that liberal arts colleges train you to BS. I think modern journalism reflects the fact that these people were at the top of their academic classes.
DougJ
I think modern journalism reflects the fact that these people were at the top of their academic classes.
I’m not sure that’s true. BriWi and Peter Jennings never graduated from college, for example. I doubt David Gregory or Katie Couric graduated near the top of their respective class.
Warren Terra
I have a lot of respect for the work ethic of many reporters, and many of them have enormously valuable specialized knowledge: Ezra Klein on health care, say, or Charlie Savage on the law and executive power, or Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court, or Spencer Ackerman on defense policy and especially counterinsurgency. Or even Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater, though I have some problems with Scahill on other issues.
But the key point there is that none of that specialized knowledge came from postgraduate school (unless Savage or Greenhouse went to law school), and certainly none of it could conceivably have come from Journalism School. I’d rather read copy written by someone with most of a bachelor’s from a decent state school who reads a lot and cares enough about a particular issue to educate themselves about it, probably writing for peanuts for some unglamorous fishwrapper or for some opinion-and-some-reporting rag like the American Prospect, than by someone who’s paid a lot of money to get guest lectures from Judith Miller and, not incidentally, the contacts necessary to secure an unpaid internship at the Times or the Post.
Kris
@DougJ:
It shows that BriWi didn’t graduate college in his asinine reporting.
A little off topic but can anyone imagine a black person rising to their roles without a college degree. Amazing.
HumboldtBlue
I think most folks here are confusing the term “journalist” with television news personality.
Sy Hersh is a journalist, McClatchy still hires journalists, my local newspaper is staffed with journalists. Journalism is a skill developed like any other skill, with plenty of practice and practical application. It means creating your own sources outside of the official press release or news conference. It means the ability to communicate clearly and effectively sometimes difficult subjects that touch of many facets of politics and society.
Good journalists can not only tell a story, they do it backed up with research, interviews and any available information germane to their current task.
TV newsheads are not journalists. They are at best, reporters, dutifully reporting back the details of the latest White House press conference, the latest from a congressional hearing or a Senate debate. They do not research, they report. They do not develop these sources, the sources are trotted out in front of them like it’s a petting zoo and they dutifully jot down and report what the animals had to say at that particular time.
Chuck Todd is a reporter, Radley Balko is a journalist. Sy Hersh is a journalist, Candy Crowley is a reporter.
Kurtz, he’s just an ass.
Punchy
@DougJ: Pretty sure Tom Brokaw didnt either.
bayville
Today Kurtz testified as to Brian Williams’ bonafides as an “everyman” by informing the public he was once a volunteer fireman.
WOW! I hadn’t heard that…… since last week.
Punchy
And a food connoisseur.
Warren Terra
Zach, the editor of the NEJM is a MD (or at least was when last I looked), as is pretty much par-for-the-course for the editors of any comparable professional journal that combines Science News Reporting with its main purpose of publishing original research papers.
A better question would be the qualifications of the editor of, say, The New Scientist, or Seed, or Scientific American, magazines that exist to report about science rather than to be journals directly publishing peer-reviewed research.
Don
I wish I knew what these advanced and/or specialized degrees were in. It’s sure not math or statistics based on the absolutely horrible writing I see in the WaPo.
I also wish the media would stop moaning about their money situation when so much of their problems have nothing to do with the news (and advertising) business and so much to do with shitty business choices.
That’s biting them in the ass now and it has nothing to do with ad revenues. Other media conglomerates made similar bad moves.
HumboldtBlue
And a food connoisseur.
Nothing more important while covering national politics than knowing the difference between a bisque and a soup I always say.
Ann B. Nonymous
Does anyone look at a celebrity journalist and think, “Wow, they could do my job better than me!”?
Considered as a group, they don’t appear to have very active minds, and only a limited range of competency .
jenniebee
@DougJ: the thing is, those statements are truthful for everybody, it’s just that for some people, they are more truthful than for others.
At a certain income level, for instance, you stop stretching a box of Mac ‘n’ Cheese and a can of tuna over two meals and you start buying more fresh veggies. You have more money and, being a responsible person, you spend that money on more healthful living. And once you do that, it seems impossible to go back to stuffing yourself with crap. Just like, for the Cheesy Tuna Casserole strata, it’s unimaginable to cut out the tuna and dairy in the Kraft dinner and make due with just Ramen.
It’s really easy to forget, once you’re in the position of being able to drop 10% of your income into a 401k, that retirement savings at that rate is, in truth, a luxury that a lot of people can’t afford. And it’s like healthful food – it’s hard to get an audience when what you have to tell people is that their responsible choices are, in fact, luxuries. And yet, they are.
DougJ
I think most folks here are confusing the term “journalist” with television news personality.
Kurtz seems to conflate the two.
Brachiator
Huh? I know folks (from reporters to secretaries) who were downsized by the LA Times, and by any measure getting fired reduces your pay to zero.
But I take your larger point, and salaries have been coming down. What happens, even at some progressive weeklies, is that veterans are bought out or let go, and junior people hired on at significantly lower salaries.
Not only is this going to continue, but I predict that you will soon see some major restructuring of the contracts of syndicated columnists.
And there have been scads of stories about high paid TV news anchors in major markets being let go in favor of newer, younger, cheaper help. This shakeout is also big overseas at the BBC.
By the way, I can’t imagine a non-profit newspaper being worth reading.
I know a number of people in radio, but few who graduated from broadcasting school, and fewer still who found more than a couple of broadcasting school courses to be useful. Journalism school, like teacher colleges, professionalizes an industry in which you have a large applicant pool, but does not always produce people who are skilled journalists.
Maybe it’s like film schools. Taking courses and getting the stamp of approval conferred by an advance degree is not the same thing as developing talent, and gets people into the profession who are at best journeyman and at worst hacks looking for a payday or stardom.
J.D. Rhoades
The only two big-paper reporters I know have left the profession for something else. Fortunately, they’ve done quite well, but if you get them started about the state of the profession, hang on. They’re somewhat passionate on the subject. And by “passionate”, I mean righteously pissed off.
Ash Can
@Sister Machine Gun of Mild Harmony:
No, that’s BS.
DougJ
Huh? I know folks (from reporters to secretaries) who were downsized by the LA Times, and by any measure getting fired reduces your pay to zero.
Good point. And I think the LAT does qualify as a national news org.
RememberNovember
It’s the celebrity journos- those who forsake their 5 “w’s” in pursuit of 6 figures and notoriety. i.e. SELLOUTS.
Every industry has them to a degree but the newsmedia’s are in your face. For every one thousand street-beaters there will be a Matt Lauer, or Cokie Roberts, or Steve Dooshy.
Telegenics weed out the competent and capable.
in other news, the head of Hawaii Pacific Biz news died, he was also an AP alum.
http://pacific.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2009/07/13/daily60.html
and a really sad way to go – allergic to bee stings afaik
BombIranForChrist
I think one reason celebrity journalists are important, and worth their salaries, is because newspapers no longer do substantive reporting to separate themselves from the herd. So, instead, they rely on brand name journalists to grab attention.
I think Maureen Dowd is a great example of this. Her columns are unbelievably bad. But everyone knows her name. And so she will always have a job, no matter how bad her prose.
Warren Terra
With regards to the bottom lines of the newspapers, I’m very much not an expert, but it’s worth keeping in mind that while they face truly daunting prospects due to structural changes (Craigslist killed the classifieds, online information streams that are hard to monetize, big changes in the advertising industry, etc) and have of course been hit hard by the recent downturn, at least until very recently the thing killing newspapers wasn’t salaries or advertising or anything of the sort: it was debt load, and the principal villain was leveraged buyouts.
Prior to the recent crash, you’d consistently hear of sweeping cuts or even closings at newspapers that in fact were turnng out strong operating profits, even on the order of twenty percent, because the greedy and self-aggrandizing nitwits who’d bought them with borrowed or investor money, or had already owned them and borrowed against their incredible book values, needed still more return. What Sam Zell did to seize, drain, and destroy the Tribune papers is a great example, but was only the most recent and largest, with Knight-Ridder as a previous case.
Warren Terra
Re #51, Maureen Dowd made her name by being an unbelievably bad White House Correspondent. I mean truly awful, in a way that quite boggles the imagination. She actually wrote a book about her stint at the White House a couple years ago, about how she couldn’t remotely be bothered to give a crap about doing a decent job. Her book tour, with interviews at Fresh Air for example, quite boggled the mind with how smugly she bragged about all this. Believe it or not, and even considering the regrettable quality of her replacements, promoting her from White House Correspondent to write 1400 words of catty nonsense for the Op-Ed page each week probably improved the paper’s reporting, just because it was no longer her job (the long term effects of the incentive structure her promotion represents may be another matter).
freelancer
Slate dot com actually has some media criticism/satire that’s full of win:
How Apollo would be covered if it happened today.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/200907200031
My fav, the Twitter feed, “Suck on it China” and “RIP Michael Jackson”.
Calouste
@Brachiator:
“By the way, I can’t imagine a non-profit newspaper being worth reading.”
Yeah, no one ever reads or quotes the Guardian.
flounder
I’ll take credit for this one. This was actually my most acerbic comment/question I sent in to Howie today. I sure didn’t think it was the one he would address.
And I wasn’t talking about the guy at my local paper. When did he rap with Rove or send mash notes to Mark Sanford?
Brachiator
@Warren Terra:
Just not true. Newspapers have always depended on advertising revenues, not circulation sales, for the bulk of their profits. The rapid and permanent decline of first display ads (ads for department stores, supermarkets, etc) and later classified ads are pretty much killing newspapers.
Yes, some newspapers had been doing well and had tried to amp up profits past historic levels, but the InterTubes came out of left field and changed everything in unexpected ways.
Sam Zell didn’t just buy the Tribune papers, he also bought the LA Times, which at one time led all dailies in advertising lineage. But the Times had been losing money — and downsizing — long before Zell over-extended himself.
The San Francisco Chronicle, Rocky Mountain News, Christian Science Monitor – whether well-run or over-extended papers — the Internet is killing them all.
techno
In 1970, I made to London as a VERY poor college student. Everyone I talked to wanted to talk about the moon landing. They would ask incredibly complex questions. Coming from a USA where people my age treated the moon landing as a PR distraction from the Vietnam War, I was initially taken aback by the interest. Fortunately, my anti-war buddies aside, I was a closet space geek so I had a LOT of fun with new friends discussing the nuances of the space race.
Flash forward. PBS airs an incredible history-of-technology 10-part series produced by BBC called “Connections.” The host was a guy named James Burke who has a very interesting view of how the Industrial State was built. And yes, he included the moon shot in one of his sequences.
Turns out Burke was the guy the BBC had covering the Apollo program. No WONDER the folks in London knew so much about the space race.
I bring this up on the occasion of the death of St. Walter of Cronkite. HE was the guy who told us about the space program on CBS. Compared to Burke, he was barely more than a passionate fan of the space race. He didn’t even pretend to care how the rockets in front of him came to be. So he perfectly encapsulates the BIGGEST problem with American Journalists–they don’t know anything. They don’t know history, or economic theory, or technology, or, or…
So when confronted with a subject that has a science aspect like, say, how to solve the problem of replacing petroleum in a society built to run on petroleum, your typical science-challenged professional journalist will treat it as a he-said, she-said issue. Sometimes one wonders if scientific illiteracy isn’t a professional requirement of the chattering classes.
And this a-good-journalist-can-report-on-any-subject attitude was sort of set in place when CBS let Cronkite cover the moon shot. Big mistake. We simply MUST insist that our journalists demonstrate SOME expertise in the subjects they cover. If they cannot provide context, they really add little to the value of their stories.
And of course, the Internet has just exploded this model. If you are serious about finding out something, you can probably find someone with genuine expertise. And there are millions of folks out there who write at least as well as the bozos they have writing for the Washington Post.
I say, let the death of Cronkite be the death of a journalism that was often very thin gruel. It was let’s-pretend father figures who wanted us to believe a point of view simply because their presentation was so awesome.
And because acting out as father figures is more important than actually knowing something, the Americans who actually paid for this FINE entertainment that was the moon shot came away with about 1/10th of the understanding of the event their British cousins got for free–because Uncle Walt thought he could cover rocket science.
DougJ
I’ll take credit for this one. This was actually my most acerbic comment/question I sent in to Howie today. I sure didn’t think it was the one he would address.
And I wasn’t talking about the guy at my local paper. When did he rap with Rove or send mash notes to Mark Sanford?
Good work. I didn’t think you were talking about the guy at your local paper. I was afraid it sounded like I was.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
RE: “By the way, I can’t imagine a non-profit newspaper being worth reading.”
I read The Guardian, but rarely quote it. And I know a fair amount about the financials of US papers, but extremely little about the business side of UK and other foreign papers. But I did find this on the Wiki, about The Guardian, which is formally owned by a trust:
Revenues gotta come from somewhere. And I hope that The Guardian’s losses have not been increasing.
geg6
Yeah, Howie. Cuz that advanced degree and extremely specialized knowledge that I have has certainly put me in the upper middle class and allows me to run in social circles that include movie stars and captains of industry. Wait…what? Oh. Never mind.
ET
Kurtz is being a moron. He totally missed the point of the question and answered the question he wanted to answer because that was the easiest to dismiss. The harder question for him, was about the cozy relationship between reporters and those they report on.
This attitude is exactly why the media don’t seem to evolving. They are stuck and won’t admit they have a problem much less that they are part of the problem.
linda
Walter cronkite would have never shaken his ass for turdblossom…unlike dancin’ dave gregory.
Gregory
Horse manure.
…actually, all of a sudden I see the point.
bago
@techno: James Burke Rocks!
White House Department of Law (fmrly Jim-Bob)
Nice straw-man, Howie.
Is there REALLY no way to discuss class issues without conflating star reporters’ salaries with their inability to maintain a professional distance from the issues?
If so, then, yes, by all means cap their salaries.
MNPundit
Booman also tore into Cronkite. It’s the only negative reaction to his death I’ve seen and even that was more of “I can’t like him because I think the CIA-loving news division he represented” than to him.
Mike
When I was considering a career in journalism, a family friend with a husband who was a 20-year veteran of a #5-10 market daily with a Pulitzer at home said he made about $75k/year. I’ve seen some different numbers on experienced NYT scribes anywhere from $90-150k/year. Now I don’t want to go all McCardle and complain about that much money in NYC, but they’re hardly huge numbers from experienced journalists who have prospered in their careers.
Broadcast journalism is a bit like acting. They’re a 200-500 (?) people who make good money. And many, many more who pull down less than $30k.