More on Journalism
I think I'll start a new feature: careers I love to trash, or something like that. Jack and I made a good start on English profs (who are, of course, completely different from History profs or Math profs), and I occasionally might mention some others. Though since my general thesis is that all professions have been disgraced and delegitimated during the first decade of the 21rst c., it is probably redundant.
So here I'll just continue to beat on the dead horse of journalism, courtesy of a "Letter from Washington" by Conor Friedersdorf guest writing at andrewssullivan.com. Here is my favorite intemperate blast:
There is this idea among movement conservatives—especially the rank-and-file—that Washington DC journalism is populated by a lot of disingenuous, careerist sell outs. These elites write to enrich themselves, to inflate their sense of self-importance, and to garner social capital, invariably measured by invitations to the dread “Georgetown cocktail party.” Thus they are unconcerned with truth, intellectual honesty, or the actual interests of anyone outside the New York to DC corridor.
This narrative is largely true!
It picks up steam from there. Friedersdorf ends up pointing it at mainly conservative hacks, of which there are plenty, but I think it is a much broader critique than that. If there is an underlying theme to the First Decade it has been careerism and the intellectual corruption it instills.
corruption: a family value.
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Labels: cranks, demonology, journalism
posted by Clemens @ 12:01 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
I'm due for a change of career in a couple of years, so go ahead and disillusion me now: how did mathematicians disgrace and delegitimize themselves in the 20th century?
I'm not disagreeing, mind, I just can't think of anything offhand.
Jon Stewart said is best: Our media doesn't have a liberal bias, it has a lazy and pandering-to-the advertisers bias.
Hmmm. Tough question Jack. They are, however, a subset of the professoriate who are undermining Western Civilization even as we speak. And we have already discussed English profs. But mathematicians cut a low profile in our society: I am sure you guys have done SOMETHING really awful.
Isn't John Derbyshire a mathematician?
Hmm, good point. He was an extra in a Bruce Lee movie, and that's disgraceful in my book.
His surveys of mathematics are excellent, though.
His anti-illegal immigration position is, a tad hypocritical, by his own admission I think. Even so, that's not *doing* something disgraceful.
Come to think of it, if you want "doing" something disgraceful, I suppose the German mathematicians who collaborated with the expulsion of the Jewish mathematicians from the universities disgraced themselves—but from your language I thought you meant disgracing the entire profession.
The Derby an extra in a Bruce Lee movie!!?? I rest my case.
More seriously, almost all of the German professoriate covered themselves in dung during the Nazi years, especially historians and archaeologists. With his open avowal of the Nazi project and the ethnic cleansing of his department Heidegger did nothing to show the value of a life in Philosophy. But then the entire German nation did not look good in that little episode, IIRC.
But I am still convinced that there is some mathematician out there who was really really naughty.
More on the Derby anon.
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