Just who the hell do you think you are?
You can start yapping to me about your High Holy Professional Obligation to Blab Classified Information Just Because You Think It Will Sell Ad Space when you tell me…
— why you think you’re a professional. If you’re a real professional, you are subject to a governing board with rules and the authority to enforce them. Lawyers have the bar, doctors have their medical associations and boards. Where’s your board? For that matter, where’s your commission or license?
— and who, precisely, gave you this task. This is a democracy. So who elected you? Who gave you this oversight power? To whom are you accountable?
Selfish jerks.
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The NY Times is a rag. I think they have been a joke for so long, they thought breaking a story (and not just an editorial) would bring up their status to a real newspaper somewhat. But it is nice to sell papers at the country’s expense.
Hey, gotta stick up for my profession a bit here. 😉 All offered with much respect, and a sympathetic sigh to you at the uppitiness of the NYT:
Journalists are professionals, with governing bodies and associations (they differ from country to country). Just cause you don’t know much about those associations doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
As for a licence…. when your job is to uphold freedom of speech, it seems to be a little, um, unfree to require every journalist to carry a “government-approved” card. The first way the government would shut up any opposition would be to pull your credentials (or have you offed). It happens in autocratic states the world over.
Besides, writing is something almost any educaetd citizen could do, and people enter journalism from many different fields — a licence would make that enrichment of the craft almost impossible.
And who gave us this task? If you read the newspaper, then you did. Period. If you choose to pay for a paper, then you give the journalists within the moral licence to “police” your democracy — because you’re paying them to do YOUR job as a citizen.
The paper is also accountable to you, the reader: simply stop paying for it or reading it, and convince others to do the same, and you have censured it.
I’m a radio reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — I cover health. My paycheque is paid by taxpayers (the CBC is funded by the federal government here, but is run arm’s-length — sorta like the BBC — so the government has no control over what we broadcast). I take that “taxpayers are my boss” thing very, very seriously.
As for the NYT: Pansy’s right, in many ways it is a rag. Read something else — it certainly isn’t the only paper in the world, although it loves to pretend it is.
I don’t think violations of the law are best addressed by boycotts, but rather by criminal penalties. Nor did I realize that newspapers had been granted a special dispensation to break the law in cases where the rest of us would not be exempt. (If, of course, the information revealed was truly classified.) And it is not the press’s job to uphold the freedom of speech. They are not an organ of government, and their right to exercise that freedom is no greater than mine.
“The paper is also accountable to you, the reader: simply stop paying for it or reading it, and convince others to do the same, and you have censured it.”
If a doctor prescribes the wrong treatment; if an engineer designs a bridge that falls down; if a pharmaceutical company sells a worthless drug; if a grocery poisons its customers with salmonella: they can be held accountable. But a newspaper, while asserting its supreme responsibility to provide the people with the information they need to make decisions affecting the survival of their nation, can withhold the truth, or print only half of it, or disclose information that helps an enemy in wartime, or print outright lies: and when confronted, can get away with saying “Well then, go somewhere else.”
This is not “accountability”; this is no more than caveat emptor.
Damn, Bob, wish I’d thought of all those analogies.