Yeah Yeah. Probably nothing here I haven't already said.

Still bedridden. Still bored. But I need to be doing this anyway.

Cooper pointed me in the direction of an interview in Time Magazine with the woman, the myth, the legend. It's a great interview, and Helen Thomas is, of course, a national treasure. But there's something she said that I need to weigh in on.

Everyone with a laptop thinks they’re a journalist. Everyone with a cell phone thinks they’re a photographer. So our profession is sidelined in a way. There’s no turning back. It’s frightening because you can ruin lives and reputations willy-nilly without realizing it. No editors. No standards. No ethics. We’re at the crossroads. So many newspapers that are so valuable are going down the drain. It’s a crisis.

It's true that this medium doesn't have any mechanism for keeping the liars, illiterates, and fuckjobs from getting their message spread. But the means of keeping the undesirables out of the game in journalism only incidentally has anything to do with standards. When confronted with phrases like "journalistic ethics," the media exec consults his balance sheet. When confronted with a phrase like "duty to the newsreading public" some laugh uncontrollably, while others clap their hands over their ears and sing the Star Spangled Banner.

If she has any ideas about how to encourage bloggers to have class, I'm all for it. But the fact of the matter is, the old journalistic model fucked us hard, and while I love Helen Thomas and know that she's not a part of the problem, she's apologizing for the people who are. The origins of Objective Journalism didn't come from a motive for fair reporting. It came as a necessity starting at the time when the majority of newspaper revenue stopped coming from circulation and started coming from advertising. Newspapers ran for the center to avoid offending anyone likely to fund their operation.

If you need convincing, witness how absent these principles were abandoned when there was a profit motive in the leadup to the Spanish-American War. Hell, the highest honor awarded to journalists is named after a man who told his photographers to just take some shots, and that "I'll supply the war"

And you can draw a direct line from there to true political Moriarties like Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. The desire on the part of some journalists and most editors to be Objective kept the Truth--which for those beasts had to be expressed subjectively-- out of the common knowledge. And it could have happened again if it weren't for bloggers. Remember how CNN covered Sarah Palin? Wolf Blitzer was falling all over himself trying not to let on that he recognized her as the airhead she is. The people who called her out were bloggers, much to the Barracuda's on-the-record chagrin.

Let alone the utter clusterfuck that was the coverage of the leadup to the Iraq War.

This idea that more voices feeding into the discourse is somehow a bad thing is utter crock. As is the idea that the pros will somehow be crowded out. They're the ones with the access to newsmakers and distribution channels. If a professional loses their job in the midst of the rise of the blogger, it's because they weren't doing it properly in the first place, and I can't say I particularly care.

The object of the journalist is to be a conduit for Truth. Everything else is just window dressing. Anything that impedes it ought to be discarded without a moment's regret.