The Intellectual Bankruptcy Of Journalism

The title of this post may give you the wrong idea. One might read it and believe I'll be arguing that journalism today has descended from some earlier lofty perch to a degraded position. It is true, in many ways journalism has done exactly that. However, not in the arena of the intellect where journalism has always been inherently bankrupt.

Case in point: David Brooks writes the following piece commenting upon and comparing the present political situation in the UK with the US: Britain Is Working

In 1920, Winston Churchill’s mother held a dinner for M. Paul Cambon to celebrate the end of his 20 years as the French ambassador to Britain. One of the guests asked Cambon what he had seen in his two decades in London.

“I have witnessed an English revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself,” Cambon replied. “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.”

Buried in that answer is a picture of how politics should work. Britain faced an enormous task: To move from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one. This transition was made gradually, without convulsion, with both parties playing a role.

From this snippet you can get the gist of the bad analogy Brooks is working on. This represents the garden variety from of journalistic bankruptcy. To suit the needs of the op-ed writer most everything can be turned in a facile allegory, which always crumbles the second you start to pick at it.

However, the intellectual bankruptcy continues in those journalists who criticize the Brooks' of the world.

It can range from the truly stupid, such as when Glenn Greenwald opines, "David Brooks flew to London so now he's an expert on British politics...." Yeah Glenn, and your being a New York lawyer and journalist gives you the credentials of an expert. Besides, like or don't like what he wrote, Brooks makes no claim to being an expert on Britain. While I'll happily admit if we confined journalists to only expressly writing about topics about which they are demonstrable experts it would have the joyous consequence of eliminating 85% of Greenwald's writing to date, their editors may still demand more copy.

Even British journalists, who presumably know a thing or two more about their own country than a hapless American, display their own brand of intellectual bankruptcy. Take Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph for example:

[T]his column is laughably ignorant of British history and bizarrely naive about British political culture.

Let’s take a few choice bits, starting with the opening paragraph. Apparently, from 1900 to 1920:

Britain faced an enormous task: To move from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one. This transition was made gradually, without convulsion, with both parties playing a role.

Gradually? Without convulsion? I don’t know if you’re aware of this David, but most British historians believe that the First World War was pretty convulsive. And definitely not very gradual. He seems to think that Britain cast off her aristocratic rulers by a process of “constructive competition.” In fact, what happened was that we went to war, conscripted millions of young men and sent them to France to be machine-gunned.

The intellectual dishonesty of this is, frankly, staggering. For starters, Brooks did not pull this idea out of thin air. As anyone can see from my quote of Brooks above, he was elaborating upon a comment made by Paul Cambon who was the French ambassador to England from 1898 to 1920, and intimately connected to the efforts that brought England into the Great War so he was obviously taking that into account. Indeed, Messr. Cambon's 22 years of experience working and moving in the highest levels of British political society vastly outweighs the "experience" of Assistant Comment Editor Knowles who, based upon the Harry Potter like quality of this head shot, may not have 22 months on the job as a journalist.

Obviously, Brooks and Cambon were limiting their remarks to the domestic situation in Britain during those years, particularly as it related to questions of political economy. As such Brooks' remarks are quite similar to the views put forward by the historian Barbara Tuchman in her book The Proud Tower, and by the late British MP Robert Rhodes James in his The British Revolution: 1880-1939. One could certainly take issue with such interpretations, but there is nothing "bizarre" about them.

Just as there is nothing intellectually honest about journalism.