So, who can best fix problems? Who would you send to stop the flow of oil in the Gulf–an engineer, bureaucrat or journalist? I’m sorry, journalists don’t fix things, they point fingers. So, what use are they in the middle of a crisis. They are like historians recording the facts (of the winners) after the event.
What’s bringing this on (realizing that for the past 12 years, I’ve been a journalist) was listening to one of those happy talk little interviews among the insiders pieces on “All Things Considered” on NPR. So they gather three political writers with no knowledge of much of anything other than how to write soundbites for radio telling engineers how to fill the hole in the sea bed. Or speculating that bureaucrats should have been making engineering decisions.
At this point, that is all wasted energy. When the immediate problem has been solved, we should find out things such as when regulators were bought off, or when a manager overroded an engineering decision because it would take too long, cost too much, and so on (all of us who have worked for a living have experienced these sorts of things).
How about doing something revolutionary–report on the facts? That’s what I’d like to hear.
