(Previously.)

Journalism is sort of like medicine in that — in popular myth, at least — its practitioners are expected to be motivated by idealism rather than by self-interest.  We react with horrified dismay when someone like Jayson Blair gets caught falsifying his stories.  By and large, we trust journalists*, and when one of them is revealed to be untrustworthy we react rather badly.

Similarly, we don’t take very well to the idea that journalists might be motivated by profit (rather than, as above, glory).  For example:

• Greed is not a defence (Matt Yglesias)

Yglesias takes issue with Ezra Klein’s defence of The Politico — which amounts to “Sure it’s shallow, but there’s a big market for shallow and you can’t blame them for trying to fill it”.  In response, Yglesias writes:

This is true, but it seems more like a rationalization for bad behavior than a reason to do it. These are hard times for the journalism business, but that doesn’t mean that people in the media should stop holding each other to any kind of reasonable standards of quality and responsibility. I don’t think the existence of a market economy should be seen as giving everyone ethical carte blanche to totally ignore the welfare of their fellow citizens when going about their business.

Rather than a rationalization, I’d accept it as an explanation.  (The word “reason” in the above is ambiguous: it can be read as “objective cause” or as “moral justification”.)  And of course the profit motive isn’t a moral justification for vomiting forth the political equivalent of daytime TV.  The folks at Politico are well within their rights to do so, but having the right to do something doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole for doing it.

Regardless, the profit motive in private journalism has always been around, and it’s not going away any time soon.  It affects journalists — like anyone else — to varying degrees, along with the usual assortment of other motives (altruism, pride, shame, and so on).  By this point, no-one should seriously expect to find an utterly unbiased and completely impartial reporter: we know that, for example, Sean Hannity falls off one side of the fence, and that Chris Matthews falls off the other.  Why are we shocked (shocked!) to discover that journos respond just as strongly to motives like “having a job” (uh, sorry: “greed”)?

It seems to me that the problem isn’t profit-motivated journalists, but rather our expectation — as consumers of journalism — that they ought to be steadfastly unswayed by the filthy lucre.

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* Stop snickering!  If you read that Wikipedia article, you’ll find out that it’s based on… wait for it… news media citations.  We can look for independent verification and broader perspectives all we want, but at some basic level we have to be willing to take a bunch of journos pretty much at their words.