May 13, 2007
I tried to join the National Press Club in Canberra as a citizen blogger a while ago. They laughed.
Their view was that as a blogger I cannot be a serious media person since all I do is sit at home and mouth off at whatever takes my fancy. I said my reason for applying for membership as a blogger, rather than a country member, was that I was deeply dissatisfied with the the prevailing political and media power centers. Being an entrepreneurial sort of chap I had created my own online publishing instruments for expressing and activating that dissatisfaction.
The tone in the room turned cold. Hostility was the reaction that accompanied the tight smile. I pressed on: there is not enough real adversarial and investigative reporting by the Canberra Press Gallery I offered as a conciliatory gesture. An overweight middle aged journalist heard the exchange and opined that I must be one of those left-wing blogger types who act as parasites on the reporting by the professionals in the gallery who work for first-rate media organizations.
I decided to cut my loses and join the Press Club as a country member.
However, I could not resist keeping the conversation going. Doesn't the Canberra Press Gallery engage in punditry as well as reporting I asked? How is that not mouthing off at work?
The reply was swift. The Canberra Press Gallery are in touch with the common sense of most Americans and understand how they live and how they think about their government. Moreover the careers of the Canberra Press Gallery require access and information, which in turn requires networking with politicians and their staffers, and the media corporations for which they work. That's why we are professionals in contrast to you amateurs. The national Press Gallery is for professionals.
My response was that the Canberra Press Gallery was a source of the problem. The Canberra media are not outsiders looking in on the Canberra power system, for they are eager participants within it, and so cannot they perform the adversarial and watchdog functions that our political press says it performs and upholds. Moreover, the Canberra media are not representative of the Australian heartland or mainstream since they largely attribute their own views to what ordinary Australians believe. So we need to ask what, if anything, does it mean to be a professional journalist?
As you can see the conversation was going nowhere. A divide was looming. Time to move on.
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Go for it!