§78 Journalism: Occupational Incompetence and Hazard

Marketing has within a decade undergone a shift in form — from overt to covert promotion. Ours is the present in which ‘content’ triumphs over ‘commercials’. Qualms about ‘advertorials’ and ‘sponsored content’ are in the age of content marketing redundant — along with such editorial interstitial spaces themselves.

The spread of ‘content’ as a boundary-blurring notion has now come full circle, catching up with its underpinning journalistic activity: Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Tatler are all publications who recently submitted themselves to behind-the-scenes ‘documentary’ treatment. Talk about double whammy! In the Tatler one Lord Palmer is allowed, even encouraged, to critique the subject itself:

“Journalism is the worst profession in the world…because you [journalists] are so incompetent as a profession. ” (“Posh People: Inside Tatler [Episode 3]” 2014)

(Video here: https://youtu.be/HcW6NHLv4hI?t=608)

The object of this critique — Tatler — combines in one entity a journalistic product and a content-marketed business. If this critique contains a distinction — leveled at either of the two forms of journalistic ‘occupation’ — it would, in a historical contextualization appear as a relatively minor one. Nietzsche developed one of the earliest critiques of mass culture, targeting the school and the press (Kellner 1999). Anticipating him, Goethe had confronted the distracting, escapist and uncritical effects of the press:

‘Come let us print it all
And be busy everywhere
But no one should stir
Who does not think like we’ (ibid).

The early critique of the occupation of journalism, as mass culture, remain as relevant as in the 19th Century, when the chattering classes began ‘occupying themselves’, ‘professionally’, with impressing their opinions … en masse:

‘This language, its continual dripping — same words, same phrases — makes an aural impression…almost as an occupational hazard, the producers of these newspapers and periodicals are the most thoroughly inured to the slimy journalistic jargon. They have quite literally lost all taste and relish… With their impudent corruptions these wage-labourers of language take revenge on our mother-tongue for boring them so incredibly…When the flat hackneyed, vulgar, and feckless are accepted as the norm…then the powerful, the uncommon, and the beautiful fall into disrepute.’ (Nietzsche, F. W. 1997 S11, my emphases)

/Fred Weibull

References

Kellner, Douglas. 1999. “Nietzsche’s Critique of Mass Culture.” International Studies in Philosophy 31 (3): 77–89.

Nietzsche, F. W. 1997 [1873]. “David Strauss, the Confessor and Writer.” In Untimely Meditations, 1–56. Cambridge University Press.

“Posh People: Inside Tatler [Episode 3].” 2014. BBC 2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v566h.

Originally published at anowmedia.com on December 7, 2018.