The Guardian's, Charlie Brooker has written an interesting screed on Britain's tabloid journalists caught in Britain's phone-hacking scandal. But, as I read it, I realized how well his observations also fit modern, rightwing journos on this side of the Atlantic. See if you don't agree. Think FOX News but also think NatPo and the Sun group:
...it can't be easy being a tabloid hack at the best of times. Sure, there's the camaraderie, the sense of power, the rush of skulduggery, the thrill of feeling like one of the chosen few who can see through the Matrix but these are illusory compensations, sweatily constructed by your quaking, sobbing psyche in a bid to counterweigh the cavernous downside: the awful knowledge that you're wasting your life actively making the world worse.
Chances are you're quite smart. And you probably love to write – or did, once, back then, before . . . before the fall. Now you're writing nothing but NYAHH NYAHH NYAHH ad nauseum. You use the only brain you'll ever have to puke out endless gutfuls of cheap gossip or crude propaganda. Half the time you're wrecking lives and the other half you're filling your readers' heads with nakedly misleading straw- man fairytales. Every now and then something might come along to temporarily justify your existence: a political scoop; a genuine outrage . . . but do you build on it? No. You retreat to the warm cave of your celebrity chef shag-shocks and your tragic tot death- porn double-pagers: wasting your life actively making the world worse.
I suppose the best way to cope with the dull, constant, pulsing awareness that you're wasting your life actively making the world worse is to somehow bewitch yourself into believing you're actively making the world better.
Another strategy, I guess, would be to focus on the fun of the job, to see it as one long naughty jape. To swap tales about Fleet Street legends of yesteryear and consider yourself a fellow swashbuckling pirate.
...Successfully forging the belief that tabloid journalism is a worthwhile use of your brief time on this planet must require a mental leap beyond the reach of Galileo. This is one reason why so many tabloid stories are routinely peppered with lies – if their staff didn't continually flex their delusion muscles, a torrent of dark, awful self-awareness might rush into their heads like unforgiving black water pouring through the side of a stricken submarine, and they'd all slash their wrists open right there at their workstations. The newsroom hubbub would be regularly broken by the dispiriting thump of lifeless heads thunking on to desks. Each morning their bosses would have to clear all the spent corpses away with a bulldozer and hire a fresh team of soon-to-be-heartbroken lifewasters to replace the ones who couldn't make it, whose powers of self-deception simply weren't up to the job. Who couldn't cope with the knowledge that they were wasting their lives actively making the world worse.
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