The expertise of journalists

One of the arguments I've had is over the special powers journalists have.

In particular, I've traded words with one person who had journalism training, and disputes the notion that there is any particular bias in the media. As a journalism student, he tells me, he learned techniques to eliminate bias from his reporting.

One article I read in a combat magazine pointed out that police officers routinely believe they are better at shooting and driving than they actually are. I suspect journalists routinely believe they are more objective and more knowledgeable than they actually are.

Vox Day cites the New York Times' Nicholas Kristol:

it's a rare news organization that is trusted by more than one-third of the people in either party: the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the news media are not trustworthy.

The main reason is that they're not. The news media is largely a bunch of undereducated pseudointellectuals who regularly confuse having heard of something with expertise in it. Being educated in journalism instead of an actual discipline, they tend to have a very small smattering of general knowledge and no depth of knowledge in anything.

So much for knowledge. As for objectivity, it's very hard to obtain a balanced set of viewpoints for an interview if you don't know enough about a subject to know what constitutes its mainstream of thought. One example: any number of pieces about Republican tax cuts that fail to quote even one economist who supports them.