aro0823, bordieu

When I began my high school career, I purposefully signed up for electives such as “on-camera performance” and “basic video production” because I loved the glamorized image of the journalistic profession. Interestingly enough, the ignorant reasons that I used to want to be a journalist are the same reasons Bourdieu highlights explaining why the news industry is on a rapidly downhill spiral.
To begin, journalists don’t necessarily have to know things, they just have to have an attractive face and good speaking voice and the public automatically respects them by virtue of being on television and reading from a prompter. Automatically, they are assumed to be a part of the “intellectual crowd” (330) regardless of their actual academic qualifications. Thus, they can “impose on the whole of society their vision of the world” (330) and people will interpret it as the truth. The problem with this assumption is that, regardless of how much “real news” you think you are getting, it is always biased by the constraints and structure of the industry. As Chomsky enumerated in our last reading, even the most objective journalists are still restricted by the political economic trappings of big business and media conglomerations. So, thought journalists are allowed to posit their worldviews, they can only do so if their worldviews are relatively homogenous and will thus produce ratings.
Alas, if you are getting the ratings, no one really cares if the information is right or wrong. Weather people are perfect examples of this phenomenon: people have no expectation of the weather people and weather people have job security even if their predictions are wrong 6/7 days a week. The factual nature of the information is not the underlying issue, but instead the novelty, kitsch, and non-controversy of it all. Not surprisingly, there are “no negative sanctions for journalists” because the media industry no longer plays a real role in investigating hard news and stories of actual consequence and substance. I can’t help but think that because no one plays a real role in investigating anything, perhaps that is why so many scandals explode and the banking industry collapsed since we don’t attempt to solve problems until after they occur.
Accordingly, I wanted to be a journalist because they essentially get paid to ramble about whatever they so please (within reason), impose their moral beliefs upon society as the correct ones, and not be responsible for the massive brainwashing and manipulation of the absent minded populace.