It wasn’t exactly a notable witticism when David Brinkley remarked of President Clinton’s lengthy and rather flowery victory speech that: “We all look forward with great pleasure to four years of wonderful, inspiring speeches, full of wit, poetry, music, love and affection, plus more goddamn nonsense.” Nor was it one for the quotation dictionaries when he added that Clinton “has not a creative bone in his body. Therefore, he’s a bore, and will always be a bore.” Yet these unremarkable opinions were the talk of the country for days afterward. This was because people suddenly realized that for once, after months of tedious television coverage of a tedious election campaign, someone on television allowed to escape, in the language of men, a widely held opinion whose expression would ordinarily have been inhibited by journalistic “professionalism.” Here was an obvious social faux pas—which was also a reminder of how, for months, the media had reported with a straight face one bit of “goddamn nonsense” after another, from both candidates, while never allowing themselves to perform the basic social service of saying that it was nonsense.

Doctors and lawyers have been professionals for centuries, hacks only for a generation or two.

You may say that that is the price we pay for having a professional corps of journalists; but it is not exactly self-evident to me how anyone is supposed to benefit from journalists’ being professionals— anyone, that is, except for the upwardly mobile journalists themselves. Stephen Hess