"No ideas and the ability to express them: that's a journalist."

In most fields which require the ability to use words and ideas, many of those who make it to "the very top" have intellectual content and ability: this is true in law, in philosophy, in economics, and so on. But it is rather painfully not true in journalism, where, in general, "quality rises to the bottom." There are honorable exceptions, but they are few and far between.

Given that banal observation--a commonplace outside newsrooms--one might think it slightly perverse that media outlets should elevate former journalists to the role of pundits, analysts, and news commentators. The worst offender--if only because the most visible--has been The New York Times, which until fairly recently (Paul Krugman, an actual economist is the exception I can think of), has boasted op-ed columnists who were all former journalists.

Why not former scientists? sociologists? psychologists? philosophers? even political scientists? Who--other than journalists, that is--would think years of being a journalist qualifies you to have substantial opinions about the affairs of the world?

Herewith Karl Kraus (I may be mangling the aphorism slightly): "No ideas and the ability to express them: that's a journalist."

And Karl Kraus hadn't even read Thomas Friedman.

Friedman isn't simply trite and a bad stylist--though he is plainly both--he's in the grips of an understanding of world affairs for which the word juvenile is genuinely descriptive: he writes about nations and political actors as though they were schoolchildren on the playground, their motivations one-dimensional, transparent, and explicable without reference to any complexity introduced by institutional behavior or ulterior economic interests. The stupidity of his juvenile psychologizing about national behavior, which is Friedman's trademark, is only aggravated by the kind of infantile national chauvinism that is de riguer for all the mainstream media in the United States. (Why does the United States, which leads the world in, e.g., higher education and science, trail so pathetically in the quality of its media?)

I have long thought this about Friedman, but today's column made me want to write it down. "No ideas and the ability to express them," indeed. "Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire. Yes, but only if Friedman stays in this world. (Greg Palast has a response to Friedman, though it is badly written and far too mild.)