Michael Tracey: Most journalists have a 'pack mentality' that corrupts their craft
'They have this pack mentality that is not conducive at all to decent journalism,' Tracey says.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Michael Tracey, a writer on Substack, joined "Tucker Carlson Today'"s Friday program to discuss the state of journalism in the country, describing collegiate journalism education as ultimately impractical or ineffectual, and many of today's journalists as a "herd" that by definition hurts their ability to thoughtfully analyze current events.
Tracey described his days in J-school as being a time of "constant war with the main newspaper on campus" because his fledgling acts of investigative reporting showed they had misspent funds and sought a bailout from the college's administration.
"It's funny the kind of issues that bubble up in miniature on a campus context, especially if where you're going is a publicly funded university," he said. "[N]o one would have ever known if I didn't get a leak from somebody inside and reported it. So you once you kind of get that exposure to what it can be to do journalism – [you get]… the bug.'
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Host Tucker Carlson said Tracey hasn't walked the same path as other journalists from the new generation in that he does not seek to be part of the aforementioned "herd" and is content to garner a personal following on platforms like Substack.
"It just kind of percolated outwards since then. And it's hard because I can't really hold myself up as a model… I don't know how to exactly model what I've done, or how to achieve what I've achieved," he said.
"It's not as though there was a concretely delineated path that I followed, that I could then recommend to others, or try to model for aspiring journalists or whatever."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Tracey remarked that most people who aspire to specifically be journalists should not enter the field.
"That's demonstrably true," Carlson replied.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"Because they act as a herd," Tracey added. "Or they have this pack mentality that is not conducive at all to decent journalism, decent analysis."
"So you know, whenever I'm asked what should I do? I would say, number one, if you can exhaust every other option, do that," he said. "And then if there's nothing else that you could conceive of yourself doing, then you have to kind of jump into the deep end of trying to do something journalism or media-oriented."