When People Stop Getting J-School Degrees and Start Getting ‘Real’

Andrew Woods of "The Real World: D.C."

So I don’t want to devolve into all-out whinery, but I can’t let it go unnoticed that last night’s episode of “The Real World: D.C.” followed easily one of the most annoying, clueless and lazy castmembers in recent memory as he placed a few phone calls and – voila! – ended up in a face-to-face meeting with none other than Pulitzer Prize winner and political cartoonist extraordinaire Tom Toles of the Washington Post. His attire of choice for the prestigious occasion? A solar system T-shirt.

Emboldened by his meeting, Andrew then went to the Washington Times, where, voila again!, he was immediately assigned to shadow the paper’s White House correspondent, sit in on a press corps briefing, and ultimately have his cartoon published in the paper even after completely blowing the deadline.

Aside from having a close friend who was recently laid off by that very establishment, the mere fact that some clueless hack can waltz into a major newspaper and be taken even remotely seriously is, well, disheartening, discouraging, motivation to torch my pricey and relatively useless  journalism school degree – take your pick.

I’ve become resigned to nepotism hires like Luke Russert, Meghan McCain and Jenna Bush Hager at outlets I respect. But it really felt like a low blow to be shown that instead of working hard to get into a good school, working hard to succeed in said school, and working hard to eek out a tiny journalism existence afterward; I probably would have been better served by faking cancer or generally being enough of a famewhore to seek out a spot on “The Real World” cast.