News-Record.com

We journalists are frequently criticized/dismissed as "arrogant."

To many of us, much of the time, this is mystifying in that we honestly feel we have little or nothing to be arrogant about. (And that's often true.)

Sometimes, we come across as arrogant when we're simply being a little too open about our pride in our jobs. No one likes a braggart, even when the braggart can back it up.

But sometimes we are arrogant. And Andrewe Cline, whose Rhetorica.net blog has carved out a rich niche in the area of journalism's institutional biases, points to some examples and explains why they arise and why they are wrong, particularly in the age of citizen news media.

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that national is better than local.

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to elevate investigative reporting over solid day-to-day reporting. (I would argue that the most solid day-to-day reporting IS investigative in at least some senses.)

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that journalists have more First Amendment rights than [other] citizens.

We teach students to be arrogant when we fail to teach them that the public always knows more than they do.

There's a lot to ponder there, whether you just want to better understand professional media, critique professional media or commit some journalism of your own.