Note from Holly: I’m running guest posts for the rest of August while I handle two legal messes I didn’t create — one with my landlord, one with Verizon — and try to keep my planned trauma recovery retreat on the calendar. For now, my Substack and art print income are going toward legal and moving costs. If you’ve been thinking about subscribing or picking up a print, this would be a great time.
This is a guest post by , whose Substack I enjoy. She is one of the five sane therapists left on earth, and I keep mine too busy to write so it’s only fitting I publish one of the others!
As you read this, I need you to imagine a different world. Perhaps you’re recalling it from memory. More likely you’ll need to pretend, because most of Substack seems to have done fewer loops of the sun than I have.
In this world, social media was still a distant gleam in a thirsty nerd’s eye. Phones didn’t have cameras. If you asked a woman about her “personal brand”, she’d assume you were asking if she buys Kotex or Tampax. We’re talking Bush in the White House and Harry Potter in theatres.
In this long-ago world of American Idol and Dream Matte Mousse, I made what I consider to be one of the single dumbest decisions of my life (and believe me, the competition for that title is fierce).
I went to journalism school.
I lasted a little over a year at journalism school, about 11 months longer than I should have. Most of the big names would have been studying at the same time as me, those at the tail of Gen X or the beginning of the Millennial generation. The middle-aged cohort. The ones that need to dye their roots now (or get regular Botox). The ones with enough experience and gravitas to have “made it” to the peak of their career.
In my admittedly brief experience, people broadly seek a career in media for one of three reasons.
1). They want to write for a living … but they’re stupid. They don’t yet have the maturity and/or common sense to realise that this is a very poor industry in which to practice the art of wordsmithing. This is partly because the working environment quickly pickles creativity and panache into ceviche, but mainly because this kind of writing has nothing to do with creativity. A robot could do it (zing).
2. They’re on a mission (a crusade, if you will) to right the world’s wrongs through the power of a huge platform. Not only does this involve clinical levels of hubris at a rather tender age, but rigorous disrespect for the “objectivity” we were all supposed to be striving for.
3. They want to be famous. This was a particularly prevalent motivation in the early 2000s because there was no Instagram. If you were aesthetically blessed and wanted to become a public figure, it was basically this or handing out cans of Monster at truck rallies hoping to get “discovered.” It didn’t help that the quintessential “It Girl” of 2003 always, always always worked in journalism or media. Sex and the City has more to answer for than the spawning of a thousand shitty thinkpieces (it wasn’t that deep guys, come on).
There was the odd unicorn who obsessively loved journalism. You know the type; every school has one. The guy (or girl) who edited the school newspaper, took yearbook photos, wrote and distributed their own “community newsletter”, recorded vox-pops in the quad, and yet somehow remained so annoyingly endearing that nobody threw them in a toilet.
I’m just one person in one university. For one year, many years ago – not a particularly robust dataset. But if I’m even a little bit correct, this gives a dose of context to the mass communication landscape we’re observing today.
Very, very few people went into media because they loved the idea of reporting the news or honoured the role of informing the public. They either wanted to shape public discourse, or they were willing to say just about anything if it had a chance of making them famous.
It wasn’t about the news.
It was almost never about the news.
It was supposed to be, according to the theory we were learning about becoming the Fourth Estate, joining a long tradition with hefty responsibility. To seek truth no matter how personally inconvenient or upsetting. To ruthlessly pursue the ideal of objectivity.
To remember it isn’t about you.
To respect the complex and morally demanding position you occupy. To remain mindful of the dangers of “giving the public what the public wants”, while equally weighing the damage you can wreak by deciding you know better than the public what they need to know.
In addition, there was already a chasm between the “objective ideal” we were being taught, and the views that were acceptable (and unacceptable) to express in a lecture hall under pain of complete ostracism. The few earnest, wet souls unwise enough to express any kind of conservative leanings were publicly shanked in the first weeks of classes with sharp, condescending “Well, actuallys”.
To be clear, I didn’t consider myself particularly aligned with these students. As weird as it sounds to say in 2025, back then you didn’t have to declare allegiance to a “side”.
Quite the opposite, it was considered gauche to be too vocal. “Avoid discussing sex, religion, or politics” was the social Golden Rule of the time.
What I couldn’t stand was the jarring dissonance between what I was being taught (attempt to be personally objective at all times in your work) and the real, unspoken values of the faculty (there is absolutely a correct way to think, and if you don’t think this way you are either stupid or cruel, and must therefore be either swayed or neutralised).
For example:
• Journalists must be politically neutral BUT I loudly identify as a Marxist, invite controversial protestors to give guest lectures, give anybody an A+ who is prepared to namedrop Adorno and Horkheimer, and talk a lot about the hideous bourgeoisie (I wish I’d been savvy enough to appreciate the irony of an academic hating the middle class back then, it would have brightened up a lot of crushingly dull lectures).
• A good journalist should read from a huge variety of sources and be prepared to engage with work that does not align with their personal views BUT Fox should be disbanded, the talking heads should be tried for war crimes and watching it will give you cancer (and you’ll deserve it).
• Ethics should be carefully, thoughtfully studied and weighed BUT here’s why utilitarianism is the best system of ethics, and why “the public good” will always outweigh damage to individuals. Let’s also not think too much about who gets to decide what is “in the public good”.
• Here’s the deal with “off the record” BUT just “off the record” there’s no such thing as privacy and confidentiality if what you’re being told is important enough (again, let’s just take it for granted that WE are the right people to be making that decision, even if it endangers lives and erodes trust).
• Here’s what Just War Theory is BUT here’s a variety of guest speakers who are going to tell you why there is no such thing as a Just War, and if you question this view you are Basically Hitler (again, irony).
• Attacking and ostracising people for their views is unhelpful, all it teaches them is to stop talking openly BUT we’ve created this exact environment right here in the lecture theatre.
Again, my personal view on these stances varies and is not at all the point. Please don’t imagine you can draw conclusions from this list about where I stand, and why this might make me a good (or bad) person to listen to.
The point is the hypocrisy.
The way in which we were being taught explicitly to do one thing, while implicitly trained to believe something else altogether.
A close friend of mine at the time, who felt similarly disturbed by the conformity of thought we were being corralled into, began to push back. Predictably he became “that guy, ugh”. It did something to my friend, that experience of being hated by the mob. He was less funny, less light. He calcified into something unyielding, and as time went on he started to cynically lean into being hateable, deliberately provoking reactions – the consummate firebrand.
To this day, I suspect this exact dynamic creates some of our more unhinged media personalities.
While I see this time in my life as largely a costly mistake, some days I think the knowledge I went away with was worth it. I hold a weird tension between love for the time-honoured principles of good journalism on one hand, and ugly knowledge of the inner workings of the machine on the other. How rare it is for anybody to be there without a powerful streak of either zealotry or narcissism. How even the earnest, open, and thoughtful souls are trained in what to think instead of how to think.
I personally don’t trust much of what I read, for obvious reasons. But I also don’t believe ‘the media’ as an institution is entirely hateable, irredeemable, or awful.
Narcissism, tribalism, hubris and condescension are not more “human” than curiosity, determination, bravery and a willingness to chase truth no matter the cost. I still believe in journalism’s heart, because I still believe in human goodness and courage.
So, I think perhaps the best any of us can do in the current media landscape is strive for the spirit of journalistic integrity in ourselves.
Even if the only “audience” we have is our own mind.
So many of us engage with media only to confirm what we already believe. This was one of the first things I learned at journalism school, already true in the early, clunky days of online news. How much more relevant and terrifying that reality becomes, the more our online experiences are curated to match our existing systems of internal meaning.
The only possible solution to the state of the Fourth Estate (as I see it), is to engage with a diverse spectrum of thinking and theory and do so with as much curiosity as you can. Find commentators you trust (those with allegiance to nothing but truth …Holly’s a stellar example, in my humble opinion)1! Follow the story, the question, the issue wherever it goes. Read a lot, and broadly. Do your best to open yourself to being changed by new information. Even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts. Give your trust carefully, for it is precious.
The core of an ideal endures, no matter how the people around that organising principle disgrace or redeem themselves.
No matter who leaves or stays.
😭😭😭 I edited this in the middle of dealing with legal nightmares…bless you, Skye.