Why, I am asked by a reader, do I have such disdain for journalists. I don't, but let me clarify. There are some very good political and literary journalists – see the links column. One the other hand, I do think there is more than a grain of truth in the words of Georg Lukacs:
The specialised ‘virtuoso ‘, the vendor of his objectified and reified faculties [..] This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.
[See here - scroll down]
So, not journalists qua journalists, but journalists qua apogee of capitalist reification, vending machines of their own processed emotions and opinions.
n.b. I wonder whether, potentially, the weblog opens up a space outside the logic of journalism (- where is not merely an adjunct to journalism (e.g. Pollard) or a failed aspirant.)
(Adorno, comments thus on the Lukacs passage:
Under a priori saleeability the living has made itself, as something living, a thing, equipment. [..] All that is left are the light, rigid, empty husks of emotions, matter transportable at will, deviod of anything personal.)