Michael Pascoe’s columns are mostly enjoyable, and sometimes even informative, but his reflection on 50 years in journalism was a disappointing column.
Had I stayed in journalism, I might now claim my 40th anniversary, but I didn’t, for some of the reasons Pascoe’s ode to himself was shallow, self-serving, and lacking perspective of his place in Australian society. Call it class consciousness that’s missing.
The gist of things is that scepticism is to be preferred to cynicism because some old guy told him cynicism would ruin his ability to see the good in things, and that society is a marvel because so many things come together to make ambulances arrive at accident scenes and offer supermarket shelves filled with goodies.
An underwhelming view of life, and an admission he doesn’t really know much about political economy, or what it’s like living in a slum on next to no money. Because such people mostly don’t count and can be dismissed as clichés and stereotypes.
Pascoe doesn’t mean to be, but he’s a terrible bourgeois snob, watching the world through those rose tinted spectacles, in which his own, narrow prejudices are actually evidence of an open mind.
It’s an attitude that imprints the biases of journalists on what they report in the fatuous pretense that this is as close to truth and objectivity as they can get. Worse, there’s nothing at all about telling truth to power about it, nor any real evidence of acquiring a wide range of knowledge about diverse topics.
Australian media consumers are not the worst informed in the world, but they certainly don’t get any range of perspectives from their nominal journalists, all of whom seem dedicated to a complete lack of self-awareness, whether they have sold their souls to plutocrat owners and their line of ideological blather, or are scraping by on second-string publications trying to survive the social media steamroller.
I’m sorry I read this column. It will make reading Pascoe less enjoyable from now on.
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