Why journalists deserve low pay

Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of themselves, such as beauty, truth, and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement, including awareness, belonging, and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value.

I disagree. I've seen some journalistic writing and photography that I'd say qualifies as art.

Also: journalists have been poorly paid (excluding the national talking heads) for a lot longer than the Internet has been stepping on their turf. Terrible pay was one reason I left journalism.

Nowadays it's supply and demand, but it seems a bit like salt in the wound to say "they deserve it."

Before Watergate made it fashionable, most investigative journalists had strong personal motivation for their work. They would have fit right into the last election cycle as bloggers. I suspect that's also true of Bernstein, but under today's conditions Woodward might have chosen law or business.

After Watergate, every journalism group seemed to jump into investigative journalism with both feet. Afterward it became apparent that this wasn't sustainable, and investigative journalism declined again. However, there will always be a certain number of motivated investigative journalists (or, if you like, muckrakers). With modern technology, they can publish their own work at a very low cost.

There's also a whole side-conversation about diversity of opinion and reporting being key, but that does rely on high quality reporting, which we need more of.

Careful: this way lies Marxism. The value doesn't lie in the labor itself, because if the labor was just as valuable as the product of that labor then why not save the labor and sleep in? The value lies in what is produced. Which is why using less labor to produce something more useful is more valuable than using more labor to produce something useless.

"once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable"

You've gone through a loop and said nothing. I think a rainbow is beautiful because (by your account, which spuriously dispenses with the possibility of individual taste or universal beauty) my culture values pretty colors. But in what way does my culture value pretty colors? Answer: we find them beautiful. You basically said "we think things are beautiful because our culture defines what we think is beautiful", which is a simple, testable, false statement (some standards of beauty are shared across cultures, other standards can differ within a culture).

"To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony?"

You can have harmony without everything in the world being harmonious. By analogy, can't we only call a system or an interaction "harmonious" if it is something distinct from disharmony? Isn't there a difference between two instruments playing the same pitch (or harmonious pitches, such as the same note an octave apart) and two instruments playing completely disharmonious pitches? (The answer is yes, and this can be scientifically demonstrated.) Likewise, when a group of people act in concert to achieve more than the sum of their individual efforts, is that not more harmonious than a group of people warring with themselves?

Then there's the fact that many of these muckrakers didn't actually do good.

Take Nader. While the Corvair was made by "evil" GM, it was significantly safer than comparable cars of the same era, especially the VW bug/beetle. The bad publicity that Nader created out of whole cloth chased GM out of small economical cars.

> After Watergate, every journalism group seemed to jump into investigative journalism with both feet.

It's not so much investigative as "change the world". It turns out that journalists don't actually know better and are very easy to capture by folks who have their own agenda. As a result, journalists have driven their credibility towards that of used car salesmen.

Oh, and Watergate doesn't actually make journalists look bad. When "Deep Throat" was revealed, we found out that it was just revenge by someone a vindictive crank who thought that he should have been appointed head of the FBI.