Most journalists are useless

As I read and listen to more and more news, I have to come to the conclusion that most journalists are terrible. Articles, reports, deep-dives, critiques, etc… and most are entirely useless.

What do I mean when I say useless?

I mean useless in a sense, that while you may get some surface level information about the topic you will not learn anything more, than you could’ve learned by looking into something yourself, or making an interview with someone yourself. In most cases it’s even worse than useless. Let me illustrate. Say there is someone that needs to be questioned about something heinous that they did, then a ‘useless’ journalist gets to interview them. They write 5-10 questions before the interview they want to ask. These questions may touch on some important things about act they committed but never directly confront. Then the interviewee wiggles their way out of the harder questions or just say some blatantly terrible things does not even matter really, the journalists sits there in silence and accepts their answer. I imagine the only thing on their mind at this point is the next question they want to ask. The is the interview. The report they might write on this will contain the answers word for word with no commentary or conclusion, no fact checking, nothing. This is a huge problem as most people will not care so much and will have no critical thought about the interview and so they will accept this as a sort of end to the story, where it’s very much not the end of it and should not be treated as such just because a journalist did not do their job right.

I believe that everyone (at least everyone that, I think, needs to be on this opinion) has seen, listened to, read hundreds if not thousands of these articles.

I was also thinking if there are any journalists who have no job. (There certainly are.) What I mean is that there isn’t a single person who is literate and has heard of books or magazines or the internet that couldn’t write a ’top 72 movies’ or a ‘dinners you have to try’ or maybe a ’this football team has won’ article. I am aware that these have a long long history but they could really be done by anyone, I might just write a recipes or movies post later even. The difference is that I don’t or will not get paid for.

The aspect of this I find most worrying is that people love this kind of content and gobble it up as if there is no tomorrow. This is concerning because I want people to want more than this. I want people to be endlessly curious and to explore topics. I want people to be interested in the world and for them to be interested in how the world works. Most importantly why and to what end (if thse are even valid questions)? I understand that some people have hard jobs, hard lives, but if they have time to consume these they would have the time spend on something else.

I believe that most journalists today are not even interested in journalism in the slightest. I think they just ‘have a job’. Maybe it’s not their fault but their employer’s fault for not letting them be good journalists. However still I think it’s a personal failing if they actually want to do their jobs right, to not stand up against censorship.

Thankfully there are still plenty a good journalists left. Whom I respect and admire very much. It is important to note that these people almost never are in a powerful position, or huge TV or any such place.