Dad was right, nobody likes journalists. I should have been a dental surgeon
I don't hate journalists. And honestly it's dispiriting to me that so many people seem to because /good/ journalists are IMO really important to a free + healthy society. Please keep your chin up - there are definitely people who value what you do (assuming you are a journalist and this wasn't a joke (a funny one if it was!)).
Obvious caveat that there are a lot of bad journalists, and that the contemporary media environment (loss of advertising revenue /except/ from online ads, 24hr media cycle, general aggressive tone of public discourse) has meant a lot of media organisations are pretty horrible now (and for a bunch of reasons, often don't allow good journalists to do good reporting). But honestly IMO that's true of most businesses, and is partly tied to things that shouldn't be about money and
only about money being made about money and only about money.
Take the construction industry where I am. Construction should be about providing people with homes, roads they can drive on, schools, hospitals, shops, the infrastructure for life. But especially at the large end of things: regulations that used to exist to ensure buildings were of a high quality have been whittled away to nothing, and now developers form shell companies, produce buildings that leak or flood or collapse or catch fire, and then when the faults are discovered and hundreds of people that put most of their life savings into homes they now can't live in want recourse, there is none. Because the money has disappeared, and government agencies no longer have the regulatory teeth to do anything about it. And, of course, enormous resources have been put into constructing a building that is basically no good.
Sorry, heaps off topic. But I felt motivated to write this because if you are a journalist (or anyone is) I really,
really don't want you to feel like everyone hates you. Honestly I don't want anyone to feel like everyone hates them. I basically think most people are good and even people who aren't have humanity, and value.
