Celebrities As Journalists/Journalists As Celebrities
Having the role of a journalist to me seems quite a responsible role in the eye of the public. Albeit you may be regarded in the same league as estate agents, politicians and lawyers as one of the most despised professions in the country, but the thought of getting paid to get up people’s noses seems quite entertaining.
True, some journalists continually airing celebrities laundry in the tabloids is an annoyance but it sells the papers and pays the journos wages. However when you have the potential to bring a corrupt official which happened in the case of Bernstein and Woodward and the Watergate affair then you can see the signifcance of waht power the journalist can wield. In one repsect the press is what can hold the government into account but when you have a powerful media mogul owning your respective paper and is chums with those politicians you want to bring down it makes the job harder.
One thing I have found is the amount of celebrities turing to journalism most notably in the tabloids. Take Ulrika Johnsson or Jeremy Clarkson who get paid to write a weekly column and rant about various issues that grind their gears. With Clarkson there seems to be no limit to what can piss him off. Like wise with people like Janet Street Porter or Piers Morgan becoming TV personalities after turning their back on the newspaper game or in Morgan’s case getting frogmarched out of it.
This blurring of the lines makes me wonder if journalists are going to turn into celebrities when the market becomes too unstable and likewise when a celebrity’s career dries up whether they will come running to the nearest rag to give them a quick buck or two to get them out of bankruptcy.
The optimist in me tells that it won’t get that extreme but in the light of cyber-journalism, e-journalism or whatever-you-want-to-call journalism the prospect seems more likely. I am one to talk considering my journalistic heroes are Hunter S Thompson and Lester Bangs who gained cult clebrity status in their time but there is a point where I think the celebrites are starting to cross and invade the realms of hard working credible journalist. The day I consider Lorraine Kelly a credible journalist is when hell freezes over.
Thanks for listening to this rant,
Peace Out.
There’s thousands and thousands of journalists just doing an honest reporting, writing or production job. People might think by way of word association Journalist = Piers Morgan. But that’s because he on TV (= a celebrity). It is very misleading. For every Piers Morgan there’s a Veronica Guerin or H L Mencken. Also the very term journalist covers a very wide range of activity. I dunno what your year eight teacher thought. Personally I have a very low opinion of teachers – and managed to avoid them when I was at school and would certainly just do the opposite of their stupid mediocre opinions. And it did me no harm! One good think about journalism is that it is (fairly) open to people on the basis of talent, and worthless paper qualifications don’t count for so much so long as you can bang out stories and don’t mind being threatened by press officers and what have you (or in veronica’s case – the mafia). The similarity between teachers and journalists is that it used to be one of the very few white collar jobs that was open to the kids of working class people and scumbags generally so long as they were clever and not time-servers and had a touch of the troublemaker about them. Also basic requires were there, like the ability to spell and to kick doors down metaphorically in order to get stories. The only other white collar option was clerical work of some sort which is generally living death to the sort of person who would be attracted to journalism. Here endeth the careers lesson!
chris horrie - March 19, 2008 at 12:04 pm