Just because I KNOW somebody will copy and paste

[jsmirman]

61. I really am pretty infuriated with the death of journalistic standards

but I know where to place the bulk of my blame.

Let's be serious here - I worked at a top of the food chain publication and, forgive me for being crass, but the crap was just as crappy at that crap-fest.

It's fun having a bunch of stories that would be hilarious if they weren't so messed up - actually, they're still pretty hilarious - but the state of journalism is really, really bad.

I pretty much never make it to the end of an article in the NYT without finding at least one egregious typo.

The strangest thing (at least for me), though, is this: I think I grew up with an unrealistic set of expectations for the media. I have come to believe that there was a post-Watergate flowering of journalism and that the late seventies/early eighties was a time of unusual quality for print publications. But I don't think it was always this way. One project or another has occasioned reading tons of newspapers from the 20's and the 30's. Journalists during that period? Kind of crappy, too.

I still believe that journalists should simply do better. I've never looked back in envy, but I do look back with pretty withering scorn. I left the field because it just wasn't worth the aggravation. One thing that is truly sad, though, is that just as so many of the worst people are the only people who gravitate toward politics, journalism has become a field that only people obsessed with seeing their names in print can tolerate. There are still some good ones out there, but they are little white flecks on an otherwise vapid sea of mediocrity.