This is a picky comment, but I think it's important to distinguish "proximity to power" from "holding power". There are a lot of journalists with proximity to power, some of them doing a serious disservice to the public because of that proximity. A false story like Iraqi yellowcake uranium was peddled by high-profile, respectable journalists because they had and relied on proximity to power. But it didn't give them power, it just made them a mouthpiece.
Which doesn't make the preceding commenter right, that's still wildly off-base. I just wanted to note that the journalists close to power rarely have it, and the journalists with real power are rarer and tend to lack proximity to political power. They do exist - Murrow and Woodward for good, Hearst for ill - but most of them only have it for a moment.
(And yes, Skin in the Game is unbearable. Reading the pre-release excerpts felt like hiking through egomaniacal mud, and I'm not likely to try the whole book.)
One thing that's ironic is that Nassim Taleb doesn't appear to understand that the kind of reporters who seek out Nassim Taleb aren't representative of the entire profession.
Yes, you are right that may be top 1% of journalists actually get to speak to an elected Senator on regular basis but these top 1% have an army of junior folks who would bend over backwards for a minor favour from their bosses.
An political patrons are not always the politicians but also the lobbyists such as Planned Parenthood, NRA, Monsanto, NAACP, Teachers Union, Climate Change Supporters, Climate Change Skeptics and so on.
> you just haven't known a lot of journalists.
Are you saying the vast majority of journalists currently employed have more soul in the game than the independent bloggers and youtube channel owners who take one niche issue focus just on that ?
Are you telling me that working with some big name in media actually makes you better than people are just committed out of their passion ?
I think maybe Taleb's critique is perhaps meant to be aimed at the sort of elite tier of celebrity journalists, who are pretty easy to dislike. I tend to think the critique is way too heavy-handed, though. There's a great deal of crap being produced today but, if we're candid about it, in terms of pure volume there's more high-quality reporting today than there has ever been. People are fatigued by the effort of filtering out the garbage but it's intellectually lazy to dismiss the whole thing.
There are some wonderful journalist as well but they are mostly the exceptions.
There is another lot who called themselves "journalists" and worked hard to get the privileges associated with it without actually having passion for bringing knowledge to people. Privileges => access to corridors of power, swinging political opinion, pimping for political patrons or simply making money.
is silly and poorly thought out. The number of journalists who have any proximity to "corridors of power" or political patrons or any sort of power is so obviously, vanishingly small that it's not representative of the profession as a whole. And you might not think journalists are good enough at bringing knowledge to people, but if you think they don't have a passion for it, you just haven't known a lot of journalists.
Skin in the Game will be the first Taleb book I haven't read, but he's turned into such a tedious, self-important bore.