'They know nothing'

The fine men at Powerline provide an interesting excerpt from the piece about Ben Rhodes, President Obama's foreign policy guru:

All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Nixon wishes he could pull off something like this. But the fecklessness and shamlessnes of the Obama admin is not really what I'm interested in here.

Its the journalists, the 27 year olds who've only reported on campaigns.

I know a bit about what happened to this business. I wrote for my college newspaper. I worked for a time at CNN Inside Politics. I grew up in a media household. My father worked at NBC nightly news for 30 + years.

Am I an insider? No. But that doesn't mean I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.

When I started writing at my college paper, the editor was a 30 year old army vet. God he might as well have been my father. He still expected journalists to be cigarette smoking, coffee drinking, donut eating fat guys. He expected journalists to have little college and to have come up the hard way.

These 27 year olds that Ben Rhodes is talking about. Do you suppose they earned their chops covering school board meetings and HS football games? No, these people came right of of college, probably grad school, right into these prestigious reporting jobs.

They know nothing except the little circle they travel in, lets say Sidwell Friends to Cornell to Columbia School of Journalism to their current gig reporting on foreign affairs.

This change began in the 90's. My old man saw it up close. He used to come home from work complaining about the up and coming news room types who didn't know who Desmond Tutu or Helmet Kohl were. This was around 1992, mind you.

I saw it in my time at CNN. The Inside Politics office was staffed with a bevy of young women, that's another post, two of who are now regularly on TV. I don't think they knew as much as me, and I was there age, though far more important than I.

These were the youth on the path to success. They're successful and they didn't have to earn it.

What's worse to think about is their editors. Who thinks an untested 27 year old is qualified to write about complex foreign affairs? I don't believe in credentialisation and 'experts' or 'specialists', but I'd like to think the guy writing about the Syrian Civil War has a few by lines under his name. I regularly write magazine articles about military matters, just sorting out the sides in the Middle East is a daunting task.

Then there's this fact, they called the White House to ask them to explain what was happening. They're journalists. They're supposed to be covering the White House. I harken back to my college newspaper days. We had a placard on the wall that said, 'If everyone is happy with your newspaper you're doing something wrong.' I mean, aren't these guys supposed to be a kind of permanent opposition?

And most horrifying of all, Ben Rhodes knows he can talk about how he manipulates the press, and there will be no consequences. Of course, Ben Rhodes' brother directs the CBS evening news. That incestuous relationship is a subject for another post.