Saturday, April 09, 2022

Time For A Twitter Ethics Panel

Back in the aughts, a lot of old school journalists lost their minds about blogs, and then coped by trying to shoehorn bloggers into some concept of "journalist" by imposing NORMS and ETHICAL STANDARDS or whatever. My response was, basically, hey guys, I have higher standards for what I consider to be journalism than you do - most of the people you do let into the club don't exactly do much of it - and I'm happy to not include myself among you.

A funny thing is at the time the consensus was David Brooks is a journalist and Paul Krugman is not, and really you all have more problems than bloggers if this is your concept of journalism. I would happily exclude them both from the "who is a journalist club" but that club also includes Chris Cillizza so shruggy. 

Still blogging was somewhat finite, in that one could still point to some set of bloggers. Now it's basically everyone calling them shitheads on twitter nonstop, and they can't try to impose some mental order, even a ridiculous one, on all of that. "We must collectively band together to stand against our critics" is a funny and not entirely consistent view of Objective Truth To Power Speaking Journalism, but I suppose it is an understandable human response for people who failed to put on their brain shields before being confronted with the fact that people don't actually Respect Their Authoritah.