The dorks of perception

Great post by Charles Hill. Reporting used to be a blue collar job, it's been a downhill slide since it became a "profession."

>>Back in the day, to use an idiom that would never have been tolerated back in the day, we had reporters: scrappy fellows who knew every trick in the book, every source in the back alley, every button to push to get past the predilections of that one particular editor.

There are still a few such out there — I’ve seen some locally, even — but the national scene is dominated, not by reporters, but by journalists, who, says Stacy McCain, are a different breed entirely:

To be a journalist in Washington is to live one’s life surrounded by men who have never driven 110 mph, never spent a night in jail, and never won a fight in their lives.

The upper echelons of American journalism have become the exclusive monopoly of former teacher’s pets, who as children were never sent to the principal’s office, who as teenagers were never suspended for showing up drunk for chemistry class, who as college students never woke up at 6:30 a.m. on the porch of the ATO house, who never played in a rock band or sold a pound of weed or dove from a 50-foot cliff into an abandoned rock quarry.

Washington journalism is like some kind of perverse alternative reality where the Beta males are dominant.

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