[ejstronge]

> WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything

I think your comment implies that journalism in some previous time did not 'just hire for pedigree' and 'end up with careerists.'

When was this time and who were the specialist writers from that moment? How can one write anything without taking a political stance? We make much of the odd era of doublespeak we endure (when is a 'special military operation' a 'war'?). But it's hard to imagine that there has ever been a time where even the selection of a descriptive phrase carries political weight. My imagination may be limited, I suppose.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting your argument and you mean that content meant for general consumption has always (read since its inception) been 'generic' and with '[injection] of political opinion.'

[mikert89]

I’m saying that modern journalists are in many cases careerists, in a way that was not true 50 years ago

[ejstronge]

I actually think the opposite is true. TV did not exist in the same way 50 years ago, so journalists played a more important role in transmitting news.

Maybe you mean that those journalists were more specialized than the writers of today?

It seems that there may have been more journalists in the 1970s (when we consider people who call themselves reporters and work in 'news').

1972 - ~39,000 ( https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/occupational-outlook-han... ; a great resource to find out about what journalism was like)

2022 - ~17,000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes273023.htm#nat - search for Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers. If you want to add social media companies one needs a reasonable way to discount media streaming services. At any rate, this doesn't match what was being done in the 1970s so it's immaterial to your argument)