Oh no, you have the problem precisely backwards. Journalism is now a very respectable profession. Which is why it attracts people who don't know anything.

It was much better when journalism was a trade that you went into. Street savviness was the journo's hallmark. They had no loyalty to power, because they came from the wrong side of the tracks, and their livelihood depended on exposing secrets. Great journalists were ugly, ink-stained, alcoholic wretches.

Those people are gone. Now there's two kinds of professional journalists. Middle class people who were educated to do journalism at university, fighting over the few scraps of remunerative work left. And people who want to shill for one of the dominant political coalitions. These groups get to the gym a lot more often, but are constrained by their loyalty to the system.

So, journalism would be better if it was less respectable. We also need to put a stop to all the social mobility that's happening. When you block an entire group of people from attending university or holding office on some irrational basis like ethnic origin, you usually get some really good journalists. But there is cause for hope. Perhaps the end of privacy means we'll get more people in the media like Eliot Spitzer.