SNOW JOB

posted by James Reel

    With the blog broken yesterday, I couldn’t post this complaint when it was truly fresh, but it should have a fair shelf life, alas.
    Why did NPR chose to lead each of its hourly newscasts, all day long, with an item about Fox News pundit Tony Snow being named White House press secretary? Why should NPR have led even one newscast with such a thing? The person in that position neither sets nor influences public policy; he’s just a presidential mouthpiece, of variable reliability. The only people he interacts with are reporters, for crying out loud, not the general public.
    Oh, wait a minute—that’s why Snow led the newscasts. It’s all about journalism, and journalists mistakenly believe they have the most fascinating jobs in the world. Newspapers are always touting whatever podunk regional awards they get, as if such things mattered within the newsroom, let alone beyond it. And when a journalist gets kidnapped in the Middle East, even a fairly obscure freelancer, it remains “news” for weeks, while other kidnapping victims receive barely two mentions: maybe one when they’re abducted, and one when they’re recovered dead or alive.
    Even as a journalist myself, I’ve never understood how such a cynical bunch of people can develop such an inflated sense of self-importance. Face it: Nobody cares about journalists as much as journalists care about themselves. Not even the Pulitzer Prize for journalism impresses anybody outside the Fourth Estate.
    Maybe it would, if journalists would stop pimping their profession and instead report more actual news.