We see them shouting at presidents during White House press conferences. Yet from outside the business it may be hard to understand the mixture of financial, social, and professional incentives that have produced this self-aggrandizing behavior. Some of the changes have been underway for decades, and others have taken effect in the last three or four years. Together they have turned the internal values of elite journalism upside-down. Any organization works best when the behavior that helps an individual get ahead is also the behavior that benefits the organization as a whole.
Any organization suffers when what is good for the individual is bad for the group.
As journalism has become more star-oriented, individual journalists have gained the potential to command power, riches, and prestige that few of their predecessors could have hoped for. Yet this new personal success involves a terrible bargain. The more prominent today's star journalists become, the more they are forced to give up the essence of real journalism, which is the search for new information of use to the public. The effects of this trade-off are greatest at the top of the occupational pyramid, which is why they are so destructive. The harm actually goes much farther than that, to threaten the long-term health of our political system.