Teachers, police officers, firefighters — and journalists — have always had the deck stacked against them.
Those are professions that people do because they love the work. They know that what they do is important. That it is key to building or protecting a good and decent society and is often rewarding in ways that can’t be expressed in terms of dollars and cents.
And the greater society, consciously or not, has generally looked back at the practitioners of those arts and seen people who are, or should be, happy with with all the warm fuzzies they get from enlightening a child, saving a life or exposing wrongdoing.