Jeremy Barr has a piece in the Washington Post on how difficult it is to get a job after working at Fox News. It says exactly what I’d expect it to say. People are very wary of hiring anyone from Fox because they’re presumptively crazy and tainted by propaganda, but some of the “straight” news folks are still employable if they’ve occasionally pushed back on the bullshit, and lower-level, low-profile reporters have the best shot of all, mainly because prospective employers don’t fear any public backlash in hiring them.

First, I’d like to say that I’m not sympathetic to these people as a group. They made a deal with the devil and there ought to be negative consequences for that. Still, I recognize that it’s hard to get that first job in television journalism, and if someone offers you an entry level job with good pay and benefits, it’s hard to turn it down. Barr interviewed 12 former Fox News employees for the article, and they really offer a cautionary tale to anyone coming out of college and looking to get their foot in the door. It will cost you to get branded as a propagandist, and you may discover that there are no parallels tracks to Fox. You can step down to Newsmax TV or the One America News Network, but that comes with a big cut in pay and a huge loss of audience. It’s a harder track than working at CNN or CBS News, where you have a lot of options for bouncing around, and can potentially take steps up the rungs of the latter as you move.

My advice is that if you want to get into journalism to actually do journalism, then you should stay clear of Fox News. If your goal is to be famous and have your face on television, then maybe you don’t care about what you’ll be asked to do or whether you’re actually producing something beneficial for the viewers.

I’m not going to cry for people who feel trapped or stranded at Fox, but it’s true that some of them are capable of doing good work elsewhere.