Tom Wolfe on journalists

[Rod]

Picked up a book by Tom Wolfe called Back to Blood. It's supposedly about Miami today as the "American city of the future?"

In it, he has a managing editor of the Miami Herald talking to a reporter, another Yalie. He begins to realize that reporters were the ones picked on in the schoolyard then says this,

Boys like this kid grow up instinctively realizing that language is an artifact, like a sword or a gun. Used skillfully, it has the power to...well, not so much achieve things as to tear things down-including people...including the boys who came out on the strong side of that sheerly dividing line. Hey, that's what liberals are! Ideology? Economics? Social justice? Those are nothing but their prom outfits. Their politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak, and forever after they resented the strong. That's why so many journalists are liberals! The very same schoolyard events that pushed them toward the written word...pushed them toward "liberalism".

Now I know Tom Wolfe likes to listen to himself talk but every once in a while he spouts a nugget. Is this accurate? By the way, the book sucks. I'm waiting for my copy of To Sail a Darkling Sea to arrive tomorrow.

[Jericho941]

I think he typed that one-handed.

[Aesop]

If anything, he's speaking from personal experience, being a journalist for most of his adult life, and a Yalie himself (Ph.D. no less - at least, he turned in his thesis).
And yeah, probably writing it one-handed at that.

[Erik]

It's not true from my experience. The journalists I know of tends to be the know-it-alls, the kids that ran for student council, or had an opinion about everything. Those kids might have been laughed at behind their back because they were so full of themselves, but they were hardly bullied. They were the kids that were "enlightened", they all thought that they knew the answer to everything and therefore everyone needed to listen to their opinion.
In many ways it's the same type of kids that went into politics at a young age, except the journalists were the the kids more focused on actually studying, and the future politicians were more interested in making everyone do what they wanted.