This is a reductive and misleading summary of what journalists do. Every blogger on the Internet also writes, with varying degrees of training and success. What reporters do that bloggers don't is reporting --- surveying and cultivating sources, visiting places, making a zillion phone calls, working with fact checkers (itself a tedious job that has little to do with the craft of writing).
That's the job of a reporter. Not knowing everything, but being willing to do the legwork to find people with firsthand knowledge of things, and then relating what they have to say. That's why we call journalism "the first draft of history", and not the textbook of history.
Like every profession, journalism has limitations and is itself practiced with varying degrees of success. We're fond of Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" on HN, but ignore the Djikstra Amnesia Effect, holding journalists to a standard we rarely achieve in our own profession, where our own errors routinely cause direct harm to people through ignorance and omissions.
I don’t disagree with your first paragraph. As to your second, I think that’s part of the problem: those people with first hand knowledge are often relaying a sound bite, a piece of packaged narrative. And the journalist doesn’t know enough to really add anything to that narrative. That may be a limitation of journalism, but I question whether given that limitation, journalism is a useful vehicle for educating the public about the highly complex issues that underpin our society.
(Someone on HN changed my mind recently by pointing out that, while judges sometimes invoke history, they are generally bad historians. It was a thought provoking assertion, because it’s not uncommon for judges to justify opinions by reference to economics or social science. But they have neither the training nor time and procedural flexibility to do a good job of such analysis. My conclusion was, therefore, that such analysis simply isn’t useful. I think journalism might suffer from the same problem.)
Sturgeon has something to say about journalism just as Crichton and Djikstra do. It is not my claim that all of it is good.
But then, there's also a 4th amnesia (so many amnesiae!), a reverse Gell-Mann, where we forget all the incontrovertibly good journalism; for instance, John Carreyrou brought Theranos down, despite any personal expertise with phlebotomy, just through the power of bird-dogging primary sources.
> surveying and cultivating sources, visiting places, making a zillion phone calls, working with fact checkers (itself a tedious job that has little to do with the craft of writing).
I highly doubt that the average article even in prestigious news organizations (e.g. NYT, NPR, The Atlantic) goes through that level or rigor, given how frequently they cite provably false information. The overwhelming majority of the news articles I read, even from preeminent news outlets, amounts to summarizing a story that a different outlet broke. Often with several layers of indirection. I've seen plenty of stories about things posted on social media, and the author of the news articles doesn't even bother to link to the primary source. The latter is especially pernicious, it signals to me that the authors wants me to take their words at face value and not facilitate me viewing the relevant information and forming my own opinion.
That's the job of a reporter. Not knowing everything, but being willing to do the legwork to find people with firsthand knowledge of things, and then relating what they have to say. That's why we call journalism "the first draft of history", and not the textbook of history.
Like every profession, journalism has limitations and is itself practiced with varying degrees of success. We're fond of Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" on HN, but ignore the Djikstra Amnesia Effect, holding journalists to a standard we rarely achieve in our own profession, where our own errors routinely cause direct harm to people through ignorance and omissions.