Last week, Media Scrum received a direct message from a dear reader who we will call Trevor, because the name he sent it in under was the dopiest fucking pseudonym, and he's better off as a Trevor.
Trevor told us he had read several of our entries on the blog, and had come to the conclusion that we were a bunch of pinko commie scum, whose obvious left-wing bias showed how fucked the whole fake news media was, and that we don't know what the hell we're talking about and don't know anything about how the news business actually work.
Fuck off, Trev. You're only half right.
He's right about the socialist leanings, because we are vaguely communist scum, and most of the people working on the newsroom floor are too. It's not just a matter of personal ideology, it's a matter of empathy.
The key idea behind left-wing politics is that you should give a shit about your fellow human beings, and their well-being, and what happens to them, even if it's nothing to do with you personally, and that's a philosophy that you also have to follow as a reporter. The moment a reporter can't empathise with the subject and people they're covering, is the moment they become useless as a journalist, unable to ever offer anything but the most superficial of takes.
These socialist tendencies don't infect our professional lives as much as many civilians think it might do, because we're goddamn professionals, and we'll happily expose corruption and incompetence on all sides of the political spectrum. The higher up the editorial ladder you go, the more it starts to skew right, and there are Trump supporters in NZ's newsrooms, (although they usually drink alone). But in general there is more sympathy for the poor and downtrodden in this country's newsrooms than there is for maintaining the status quo of the most powerful people in society.
The simple fact is, if you do something cunt-ish, like call an 87-year-old woman a meth crook because she got caught up in that awful meth-testing scam that happened under your watch, and you adopt it as party ideology because your polling indicates your cunt-ish supporters like jerking off over tough-on-crime fantasies, don't be surprised when people call you a bunch of cunts about it. That's not media bias, that's just not being a cunt.
So we take that pinko label and fucking own it, but we do take issue with Trev's other contention, that we don't know what we're talking about, because we're fairly sure we know a shit-sight more than our mate Trevor.
Between the four of us, we are two journos who are in their second decade in the industry, one who has just started in the business, and one who is somewhere in between. There are four decades of knowledge between us, and while that only equals, say, one Rod Pascoe, it's still some significant time spent in a lot of different newsrooms.
We're all from a print background and between us we have worked at all the big newspapers, and nearly every decent regional newspaper from the Northern Advocate to the Southland Times, and have spent time in both the big TV newsrooms (although some of those experiences were a few years ago). Radio is a bit of a blind spot among us, to be honest, but we've pretty much seen it all in the past few years.
You might not agree with us - shit, we barely all agree on everything as it is, up to and including the use of the c-word earlier in this post, (and this entire post in fact, which one of us thought was way too self-reflective). But we speak from a position of experience and barely restrained outrage at what is happening to our industry.
We are still cowards, hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms from Superman comics, but that's because we like our jobs and want to keep them. Sometimes we need to slag off our own organisations, and we can't do that if the bosses and all you fuckers are watching everything we do.
Other than that, we're committed to total honesty here at Media Scrum. There is so much bullshit out there, and while we're probably responsible for our fair share of it, we're also getting a sick thrill from telling it like it is. That's what gets us through the day, and gets us through this profession.
Thanks for the feedback, Trevor. Duly noted.
- Katherine, Margaret and Steve
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