Earlier this year, approximately 200 of my peers and I crossed the stage at San Francisco State University and obtained our undergraduate degrees in Journalism. It should have been a glorious moment, but I’m sure every one of us, including the audience, couldn’t gauge the worth of the degrees we held in our hands. Journalism as a whole is suffering from a lack of funding, a drop in print newspaper popularity, and the movement of the news audience to the online format.

The distinguished career choice of greats like Edward R. Murrow, Nellie Bly, and Walter Cronkite has become the laughingstock of the career choice checklist. Now, journalism seems more like a celebrity hodgepodge of wannabe media personalities who have never cracked the AP Style Book.

Case and point, Former President George W. Bush’s daughter Jenna Bush Hager has been named one of the new hosts on NBC’s “Today”.

That has to be the worst proverbial journalistic bitchslap I’ve ever heard. Jenna Bush? Really, NBC?

Let’s take a look at this woman’s “portfolio”:

Hager graduated from the University of Texas.

She was an intern at UNICEF, which involved touring Latin American and the Caribbean, where she documented the conditions of poverty-stricken youth.

Hager is the Young Leadership Ambassador & Chair for UNICEF’s Next Generation committee.

Hager has published two books: “Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope”, which is about a young girl named Ana in Latin America who has HIV. The second is a picture book called “Read All About It,” which she co-authored her mother, Laura Bush.

According to Reuters, Hager has had stories published in The New York Times, as well as CosmoGirl. So maybe she isn’t completely devoid of journalism experience, but how does that translate to the “Today” show?

Celebrity and Journalism seem to have developed a hybrid connection of sorts. Even “established” and “respected” journalists like Bill O’Reilly seem more into the limelight and the reaction he gets from the public, as opposed to giving a balanced news perspective. I don’t think it would be hard to find a conservative J-school student who has spent the last four years learning and Do’s and Don’ts of being a journalist, and still be able to do a better job as a journalist than O’Reilly himself.

You don’t have to go very far to find journalists and celebrities masquerading as one another, and for the first time politics is not a discriminator for who can wear which cloak.

Future J-school graduates might as well take their degrees and trade them in for lifetime memberships to Costco. With people like Jenna Bush Hager getting gigs like the Today Show, what chances do us simpleton journalists have at getting a job ?

Magic Eight Ball says, “Ask again later…”