The wrong people have access to power

I started my first real journalism job as a particularly obnoxious 22-year-old in the sports department of a newspaper you haven’t heard of. I dressed in a cynicism not so much well worn as it was cheaply purchased. One of my favorite, stupid sayings at the time was the only difference between me (a very cool, disaffected sportswriter) and the pretentious news people is the clarity I brought to the job: I knew what I did was unimportant. They went along with the charade.

It’s a horrible way to think. If there’s a defense (there isn’t!), I was being paid minimum wage and this was supposed to be the dream job. That brings us, naturally, to the height of the profession.

I don’t know Joe Biden any better than I know Donald Trump any better than I know Paul Farhi. These are people who exist on my computer. I know them as much as I know anyone I read about. They’re characters, and rarely interesting ones at that.

Farhi’s assertion, that the lack of hot gossip out of the White House is a sign of … well, anything, is dumb in the same way Maggie Haberman rarely has anything particularly insightful. And yet, these are people who make good livings writing things that are always being posted into my Twitter feed because the Merchant of Access is the sort of play Shakespeare writes these days and you wouldn’t believe the going rate for a pound of flesh.

I wrote all of one (1) story about student government while attending Cal Poly Pomona and never fancied myself much of a serious journalist. I have always told stories about sports, athletes and relatively unserious things. I’m throwing stones through a glass house because it seems those allegedly most qualified to cover the presidency are concerned they don’t know who Kamala Harris is feuding with.

This isn’t to cape for the Biden presidency, though I’m sure Brooklyn Dad 420 is already on the case. There are so many things worth critiquing (our many foreign conflicts, immigration policy, what are we going to do about climate change, housing, healthcare, voting rights, trans rights, about 15 more things I haven’t listed!) that if you’re dropping a column on where are the leaks, maybe it’s time for you to get a new beat.

We aren’t waiting for another Deep Throat to shine the light of democracy on the Biden presidency. We’re asking journalists entrenched in the beltway to stop pissing and moaning about their comfortable jobs to start doing the work they think is important enough for a Steven Spielberg movie but only if it’s handed to them in an encrypted Signal chat.