Comments on: The Artificial Reality of the Matrix Media

By: Bob Stapler

Bob Stapler — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:21:59 +0000

Lange_1978,

You said “Your average journalist gets the same four-year degree as the average business or science major; he works just as hard and spends just as much time studying to graduate, and then he goes to work at a job that pays $25,000 a year, and won’t EVER pay much more. ¶ How does a college graduate justify to himself those four years work for a job making what high-school dropouts make? Simple. He tells himself the work he’s doing is IMPORTANT, that he can CHANGE THE WORLD …”

Skipping, for the moment, the “he works just as hard and spends just as much time studying” business, let’s extrapolate your idea just a little further. Supposing you are a college bound liberal pondering potential career path, but with no known mechanical, mathematical or science aptitude and a distinct attitude against physical labor. What path will you choose? Assuming you are not a complete moron and have some expectation of making enough to satisfy your material wants plus marriage and kids in the not-to-distant future, you are not going to be satisfied staying at or near the $25K mark forever; yet most trades and ‘real’ professions paying decent salaries (like medicine, engineering and law) can be pretty grueling; and, frankly, you might not be up to it. If you are up to it, why waste your time on journalism when you can be doing something that makes a real difference in real peoples lives every single day?

On the other hand, you took the blue-ribbon in 10th grade in poetry and the school librarian was dead certain you have a brilliant future in literature. So, you tell yourself you are the next Hemingway, Brokaw or (dare think it!) Dan Rather; and that paltry $25K is just to tide you over until you are tapped to head the nightly news. That’s the brass-ring, not some altruistic swill you are going to change the world (though thinking that too does make you feel all warm and squishy inside). Assuming our boy makes the leap from average behind-the-scenes journalist to major media-star, he has every reason to multiply that $25K by at least a thousand.

I am an analytical type and just couldn’t pass up checking out your claim regarding journalistic pay, so I looked it up. And, by golly, you are right. Over the course of his career, the average journalist can expect his pay to increase some 63% (starting salaries are now around $30K, which is about where I started 35 years ago). The average engineer expects a slightly smaller increase, but starts higher than our journalist friend will finish (assuming he makes editor in his dotage). Just for laughs, I looked at some other career moves our technically-challenged, labor-averse liberal-artsy type might have chosen, and find he’d probably end up about the same or a little worse off economically going with high-school teacher, human-resources, public-relations, librarian or social-worker (see links here):

Now, going back to that “he works just as hard and spends just as much time studying” notion of yours. Really, I must protest ‘he’ does no such thing. I started out from high school intending to become one of those high school history teachers who make next to nothing. Fortunately, I snapped out of it before much damage was done. I took a break from studying to do a little sailing – care of the U.S. Navy. When I came back, I split my time between working for my dad in HVAC and getting a degree in mechanical engineering. Studying the sciences is nothing like liberal-arts, and medicine and law are as grueling and rewarding. I stopped at Bachelor of Science, but the doctoral studies in engineering aren’t much easier than physics, law or medicine. Because I was an older student, I was outside the bell curve, yet I couldn’t help but notice the stark difference between young engineering and liberal-arts (LA’s) students of all ages. While LA’s were heavy into causes and rallies, we techies had no time for such nonsense. While LA’s were attending frat parties and getting pinned, techies were holed up in campus libraries, dorms and student unions absorbed in study. While class-size shrank in engineering and the sciences (as we progressed from freshmen to seniors), LA class-size stayed the same or grew slightly (no doubt absorbing our drop outs). A few of the better LA’s do go on to law or similarly ‘hard’ studies, but most are just eking out those white-collar jobs. LA’s even chide us geeks for spending all our time studying and missing out on the campus life, so we have it from the horse’s mouth – right? When LA’s scorned us as ‘geeks’, we smiled knowingly. We kept our noses to the grind stone, and that is the main reason we get the better pay. ‘Ant v. Grasshopper’ – Aesop-101.

The harder you study and the longer you keep at it, the higher the rewards. Pretty simple, huh? So, why does our fair haired LA settle for a paltry $30K when he can make brain-surgeon starting at $300K? Because, deep down, he knows he’s a mediocrity who aims low. We can argue all day whether LA’s are smart yet lazy or just choose badly, but we techies don’t have to wonder if we are smart and determined enough to make the grade – because we do. It’s like the adage regarding teachers: those who can – engineer (or doctor or lawyer or invest), those who can’t – muddle in the arts. We take it to the next level while the teachers, journalists, and social-workers are sitting around waiting for someone to put it together for them. Liberalism, as an ideology, is like that too. It teaches people to be mediocre and settle for less; to become ‘victims’. Smarts is part of it, but grit is the main deal. Without a little grit in you (or with an excess of liberalism), you settle for less. I’ve seen a lot of smart kids without a lick of spit and, invariably, they’re all liberals, smart enough to sound it, and studied liberal-arts in college. A lot of techies are liberal too, but it is no accident a much higher percentage of liberals are liberal-arts in school.

By: Quote of the Day « The Sisyphus Files

Quote of the Day « The Sisyphus Files — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 06:49:59 +0000

[...] of the Day The hard, cold, sad truth is that the mainstream media distort virtually every important issue of th… — Selwyn [...]

By: hvance

hvance — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:52:20 +0000

Any clear thinking person knows that the old main stream media is bankrupt. The greater questions is what can be done. There is no greater weapon than the dollar. The conservative pundits should push a boycott of NBC, CBS, PBS, and ABC and their sponsors at a minimum. It is a ploy used by the NCAA with great effect. I applaud them for using their numbers in order to be heard. If you think that 48% of this past election can’t be heard by withholding funds then maybe you don’t understand competition and free enterprise too well. Let’s play our own form of hardball.

By: lange1978

lange1978 — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:24:07 +0000

Your average journalist gets the same four-year degree as the average business or science major; he works just as hard and spends just as much time studying to graduate, and then he goes to work at a job that pays $25,000 a year, and won’t EVER pay much more.

How does a college graduate justify to himself those four years’ work for a job making what high-school dropouts make? Simple. He tells himself the work he’s doing is IMPORTANT, that he can CHANGE THE WORLD with his reporting. This means he has an agenda, and because he is probably a liberal, he has a LIBERAL agenda.

By: Todd

Todd — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:36:09 +0000

“CAN’T wait” for the next campaign, excuse me.

By: Todd

Todd — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:29:20 +0000

We all have our most despised distortion. For me it was the failure to even attempt to distinguish between the Iraqis fighting for their freedom and those (largely foreigners) murdering them in bunches. So that it became possible for educated Americans to adopt an attitude of “They’re all just killing each other over there.”

The GOP would do well to make a series of thoroughly-researched documentaries on topics such as the media’s treatment of the war; its smearing of Sarah Palin; its silence about liberal culpability in the housing collapse. These could be produced and distributed, inseminated into the system from YouTube on down, well before the year is out. This is not the sort of thing that can wait for the next Presidential campaign, being voiced by the GOP candidates.

As media, don’t underestimate the impact of the free weekly papers distributed in stores and bus stops in every major city. We need to get into that game as the core of an *urban strategy*. [NOT a black strategy, or a youth strategy, or a Latino strategy. An URBAN strategy.]

How does Michael Ledeen put it?-Faster, please.

By: Joe Lammers

Joe Lammers — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:39:08 +0000

I believe there are several reasons for press bias, some ideological and some not. News tends to focus on the sensational and exceptional, which gives a distorting view of reality itself. Also, in the past few decades, the liberal arts and social science faculties of many universities and colleges have been taken over by radical leftists for various reasons, and they tend to indoctrinate their students along this line. Since most reporters major in journalism they get a heavy dose of this. Many leftists seem to think that actual facts must be suppressed in service of a “higher truth” (something David Horowitz writes about in his book “Radical Son”). Also, most of them seem to be innumerate, which makes them basically incomptent to report on science or statistics.

By: Ronald Cherry

Ronald Cherry — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:15:42 +0000

Great article. Without the truth, i.e.: accurate information about our world, human liberty cannot survive – eventually tyranny will arise in the United States.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson

I believe one word in the Declaration of Independence is missing, but is self-evidently understood through common sense – see the parenthesis below.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the (informed) consent of the governed” Thomas Jefferson

By: tasine

tasine — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:59:54 +0000

Excellent, excellent commentary. It is so true that a people get what they deserve in government and news media, but the galling part is that we conservatives have to work so hard to get what WE deserve in government and news media.
Ah, well, trials and tribulations make us stronger.