Wednesday, 16 April 2014

Pressmen, chapter 1

Just three words

According to the basic rule of journalism there are five "W" to answer: who, what, why, where, when. According to practice there are just three words journalists mind: I, me, myself. If you look for some one with an immoderate ego a journalist is a the right person to count on. This world is full of foolish, selfish, prideful, immodest, arrogant, vain, smart ass people, but journalist is always the best, in any case. Compared to the most important thing in world journalists are special: they are the most important thing in the world, making the entire universe meaningless. The press world is infested by a pressmen totally unable to construct sentences in non first person subject. "I was there...", "I did that...", "I believe...", "I know for sure...", "in my opinion...", "It is exactly what happened to me...", "I remember...", "I had an interview with...", "I met...", "I talked to...", "I wrote...", "I went by myself...". For journalists there's no moment in life without using the first person, and the explanation for such a phenomenon is the only possible: pressmen are supermen. That's how they consider themselves. Pressmen are full of themselves, but because of religion no man would be so full of himself to consider himself as a god. But what God created in his own image and in his likeness is journalist. Before carrying on it has to be said there's a minority of pressmen who are not the kind of person we are talking about, but minorities always exist so it is normal to have somebody abnormal. In fact this minority of journalists with no ego are seen as loosers by all the others.

   As said before, there are just three words for journalists: I, me, myself. To be precise, these three words are those used by journalists themselves cause public could use other kind of words to refer to the category. It is easy to understand pressmen are not properly nice people, but they don't care: they are journalists. So having a conversation with them will be impossible, because pressmen are the superstars, and it will be sure they'll steal the show. In public a pressman has to talk about his job, in order to be sure everybody knows how important is what he does and how cool he is. Journalist means cool: here we are. Every pressman feels himself cool. That's the reason why every single occasion is used to underline that "I was there...", "I did...", "I know...", "I had an interview with...", "I met...", "I talked to...". Of course being a journalist alone is not enough: be good is even more important. So every single reporter lives to continually and constantly demonstrate to be the best. It is not a normal competition, is the useless run for personal self-glorification. Ego has to be fed, and the only way to feed ego is to grow in self-approval. So the only goal for a journalist is not to get information or to produce scoops, but make the rest of the press world envying. Envy is what every journalist wants generate. More a pressman is envied and more he will be cool. And every single day is spent to bring the others to be aware they are not at the level they would like to be. Now, by common sense who is good and is aware of that doesn't need to show. On the contrary, people without self-esteem are those who need to demonstrate to be good, and it's not necessary being a psychologist to know that. All other cases are just stupid and useless vanity.
   Technology helped pressmen to cultivate their ego. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram became the perfect showcase for self-promotion. Thanks to the excuse of using new communication channels for job reason, every pressman started posting everything can show how cool he is. Counters became the new parameters: more tweets are retweeted and more professional is considered the journalist, bigger is the number of followers and better is considered the reporter, more "like" are put on Fb and more important becomes the journalist. In high tech terms It could be called "Vanity 2.0", in colloquial language I can say pressmen are stupid stuck up human beings. I used "I". I'm sorry, I forgot to tell I'm journalist too, but I belong to the minority of the abnormal colleagues. That's the reason why I wrote all this. The reality is I'm envying: I really would like to be the best but I'm not. Believe me, you don't know how I would like to be like the best ones. Tonight, as usual, I'm going to loose my sleep thinking that.

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