Tucker Carlson is saving journalism

I should not have to write this, but journalists should accept criticism. Largely they don't. And lately they are upset because Tucker Carlson is taking them to task on his nightly Fox show.

Speaking from personal experience, your critics do you a valuable service. His criticism is golden because Carlson grew up in journalism.

He told Outkick, "When I was a kid, my dad worked in print in the newspaper and then in television. He had a sound guy, a cameraman, a producer. They’d come over to our house a lot. And I remember thinking, “These are truly open-minded, courageous guys.” They took no bullshit from anybody. They were also skeptical. They were hilarious. They acted like they lived in a free country. They acted like they had the right to demand answers from above. They were fearless in the best way, not the kind of fake, posing way but in a sincere way. Now, we just have those who are small-minded, status-obsessed, insecure, not that bright, just not impressive who are pretending to ask questions. It just makes me sick. I really hate them.They want no part of it. Maybe everyone in journalism is from the same social class. It doesn’t matter if they are black, Hispanic, gay, or straight. They might look different, but they are all from the same world.  That’s a huge problem. We are supposed to be representing the whole country. I mean, there’s probably a lot of reasons for it, but they are such cowards.

"As soon as someone asks a tough question, it’s these cowards who say, 'Bam! Take his job away, crush him, ruin his life.'

"How can someone doing this ask their wife to respect them? How can they ask their kids to respect them? How can you say you are a man anymore? They are cringing animals who are not worthy of respect."

***

That's rather harsh but earned.

Many people in the news business should cringe. Instead they whine. 

The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, attacked Carlson for daring to criticize journalists. The Bezos-owned Washington Post has a media reporter named Jeremy Barr. He filed a column, "Tucker Carlson villainizes journalists on his top-rated show. Then the threats pour in."

Uh huh.

In a tweet promoting his piece, Barr said, "I wrote about the journalists who say they have received harassment, up to death threats, after being mocked & criticized on Tucker Carlson's show.

"In Brandy Zadrozny's case, the threats were so bad that she needed armed security for two weeks afterwards."

Uh huh.

Her employer, NBC, gave her security. That's nice.

Carlson knows firsthand threats from mobs of outraged citizens. In November 2018, a leftist mob tried to storm his house while he was on the air -- and while his wife was alone. She locked herself in the bedroom.

The New York Post was the only outlet I could find that protested the leftist attack.

Karol Markowicz of the New York Post wrote, "In an interview with the Washington Post, Carlson said: 'It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat. They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation . . . They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighborhood in the city that I grew up in.'

"Carlson’s wife hid in a back room until police arrived. Their four children were not at home at the time."

Lefties had doxxed him on Facebook.

Lefties have a bad habit of doing that, which brings us to Miss Zadrozny. Why did Carlson call her out two years later?

Because she was doxxing people.

Knowing how dangerous that is, Carlson got her to stop.

RT reported at the time, "An NBC reporter has bragged about doxxing Trump supporters, “anti-vaxxers,” and other societal rejects, one self-described victim has revealed, suggesting the aim is to turn the US’ national security apparatus against her targets.

"Brandy Zadrozny, an NBC feature reporter who specializes in ‘disinformation’ and ‘extremism’ on the internet, is teaching the world how she digs up data on her targets – from phone numbers and home addresses to property records and even Amazon wishlists – to expose their real-life identities. She recently shared her doxxing methods in an online textbook hosted by DataJournalism.com.

"But while this might sound like standard journalism practice, Zadrozny’s targets – who have recently included anonymous Trump supporters on Twitter – are private citizens who have committed no crimes, and exposing their real-life identities for allegedly posting 'disinformation' is a not-so-subtle effort to turn them into enemies of the state, one such recent target, Revolver News reporter Darren Beattie, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Wednesday."

***

Which brings me to me, which is what one should expect on an eponymous blog. For 15-20 years I have been an L-Dotter at Lucianne.com. I lost my password 3 laptops ago so I no longer comment there, but people post my stuff and I read the comments.

One comment was brutal. The writer had had it with my typos and responded with a typo-laden comment.

Message received.

I doubled-down on my proofreading, and put a notice at the top of the blog: All errors should be reported to DonSurber@gmail.com

The response has been wonderful and the typos have ebbed. People take their time to correct me. And what is odd is they apologize for it! Why? They are doing me and their fellow readers a great favor.

Carlson is taking some heat from CNN for saying, "Maybe it’s because there’s no incentive to go into journalism anymore. I think that’s part of it. It doesn’t pay anything. If you want to get rich, if you’re smart, you go into private equity or leave the country and move to Barbados. Maybe the smart people don’t want to do journalism anymore."

But his is a salient point. If they are not in it for the money, what are they in it for? 

Vincent Damon Furnier once said the reason he got into rock was for the chicks and free beer. So he donned a dress and became Alice Cooper. His motivation was honorable and to be admired. 

If not money, what is the motive to become a journalist?

I sense a motivation that is less than honorable.

Nearly 16 years ago, journalism professor Jeff Jarvis took on this nonsensical vow of poverty.

He wrote, "When I chose not to go to law school and into politics (insert punchline here) but instead headed toward journalism, I knew I wasn’t doing it to get rich (though I was paid well, once I put on a suit).

"Connie Schultz, a Plain Dealer columnist, acts as if journalists take a vow of poverty, which is an extension of another popular perspective inside the news nunnery: the belief that journalism isn’t or shouldn’t be a business (a canon brought out every time a newspaper lays off journalists or points out that classified, retail, and circulation revenue are frittering fast)."

But journalism is profitable. The news nunnery is a money machine. Fox News for example commands billions of dollars a year in cable subscriptions alone. (The New York Times reported those fees as $928 million in the last three months of 2020 alone.)

Schultz by the way married Sherrod Brown two years before he was elected to the Senate, so I don't think she is begging for alms.

If journalists entered the business for the chicks and free beer, they would be better at their jobs because they would have something to lose.

But a vow of poverty places one above the human fray. Their attitude is that mere mortals cannot criticize them because they have a calling and believe they serve a higher purpose.

And the irony is that at the Washington Post, they serve the richest man in the world.

My hope is that maybe Carlson will get through the thick heads and make people in the media realize they are only human. The trade could stand a little humility.