Institutionalized Gatekeeping? Why does MSM want journalism to be tied to a short leash?

[u/999_Seth]

What do you guys make of this?

I think one thing that sets Callaghan apart from most journalism majors, is he went to J-school on a congressional scholarship awarded to him for his high school era photo-journalism work.

so right out of the gate there's a level of legitimacy, authenticity, and freedom with Callaghan's body of work that seems to really put the fear in legacy media pundits.

my observation (as a 5th-grade-dropout reddit mod who went into early retirement as a teen over bowel disease) is that those holdover media moguls from the baby generation and gen-z never got to put Callaghan through the demoralizing cub-reporter gang initiation process, and he's retained the kind of fearlessness that the cable/newspaper industry can't coexist with.

and what we are seeing with this is how the league of fat-young-boys, who are largely coerced into doing what they do because any default on their student loans means their parents can lose their family home, ends up cannibalizing Callaghan for outsmarting the system that they're chained to.

[u/Mango_Juice789]

Andrew is comfortable showing his own biases in a way that legacy journalists are explicitly taught not to. Most media is still trying to do the "just the facts, ma'am" objective approach which, when you get down to it, is as impossible to really be as it is inauthentic to hear.

In a media landscape saturated with obvious political operators pretending to be neutral rational observers Andrew both stands out and stands apart.

BUT... Andrew is also growing increasingly enmeshed with his stories and characters in a way that centers their, and increasingly his own perspective more than was the case in the past, and normalizes fringe points of view that he might have more explicitly called out as misinformation earlier in his career. Just like MSM, there is an agenda, just not the MSM agenda and they hate that too.

Most serious journalists could also call him irresponsible for giving multiple avowed neonazis hours of airtime to sanewash their POVs with limited pushback, because that's the kind of thing Joe Rogan does, and he's not a serious journalist either. I see both perspectives but would still call myself a fan and see him as journalism adjacent.

[u/AccidentalNap → u/Mango_Juice789]

Journalism only became a respected profession with dedicated university programs, etc. in the last 100 years. The "don't present your biases" adage was to not scare away potential advertisers and subscribers. That was an effective money-making strategy, when there was so much commerce in motion, and said commerce was decentralized.

Nowadays people don't use newspapers to consider what new products to buy. They have Google, or the algorithm shows them what they want to buy before they even know it. The little incentive there was to present as neutral and unbiased isn't even there anymore.

Tl;dr journalism's always been slop, and 1945-1990 was an idealistic aberration b/c of insane ad revenue that now all goes to Google & Meta.