Kneejerk reaction

I feel weirdly protective of the media these days, and it irks me when I see news outlets falling all over themselves to eat one of their own. Maybe it's the 'been there, done that, bought the t-shirt' mentality that keeps me as one of the few people who still thinks the journalists are mostly the good guys and just want to tell us what's going on. Maybe it's because I spent 18 months dealing with 'unnamed sources' because without those anonymous sources, I would have never gotten my stories. Then there are deadlines, and the fact that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't; you do the best you can, hand it in before deadline and cross your fingers. Only in the news business is no feedback a very, very good thing.

What pisses me off are the people have people who have never ever written a story in their life -- and if I haven't made it clear, bloggers are not journalists thankyouverymuch -- or chased a lead or conducted an interview saying how a news story ought to be put together. You have people saying, "Stop printing stories about insurgents and things will get better" or "Stop printing something that could potentially make someone somewhere really pissed off." Geez, from now on, I say we just print stories about Britney's baby, runaway brides, and some second rate singer's innuendo. If you don't know what's going on in the world, it can't incite you into starting a riot. Sounds like a winning solution to me.