So if journalists SAY they're so valuable...

I really enjoyed Robert Picard's essay on why journalists deserve low pay, and it got me thinking about the difficult spot journalists have gotten into rhetorically in defining their value to society. One of Picard's main points was that journalists seem to believe they have an inherent value to society that's worth ensuring they continue to survive in their current professional form. (Picard, obviously, argues that that's not the case, that journalists' value is based primarily on their usefulness to society, which is diminishing.)

So, the argument goes from journalists, the public has to act to ensure that professional journalism survives in something resembling its current form (preferably by paying for news), because it's so intrinsically value to society. Picard is skeptical of that value, but there is a group of scholars who believes very strongly in journalism as a public good, as journalists do - those, like Robert McChesney, who are arguing that the government should step in to preserve journalism for the sake of the public.

Journalists, of course, are totally anathema to that idea, but that's the logical endpoint of their argument about their own intrinsic value: If journalism provides a vital intrinsic value to society but can't be sustained by the market as currently constituted, then it needs to be sustained as a public good by nonmarket forces - i.e. the government (or charity, if that will scale, I suppose).

So journalists seem to resist both perspectives on their own value and the implications of those ideas - they seem to be saying, "We're absolutely fundamentally important to a functioning democracy, but we don't want you to set up any of the safeguards that you typically enact for those types of valuable services. Trust us to make it work within the market, but if it doesn't, it's all your fault and you should feel bad for letting us die." That's an uncharitable way of putting it, but it certainly does seem to be intellectually inconsistent way to approach one's own profession.