Sunday, April 12, 2009

McBride Screwed, MSM Not Looking Too Good Either

File this one under 'Delusions of Relevance':
Despite having no journalistic training, Paul Staines has become one of the government’s most powerful critics under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes.
Yowser! Just think what Guido could have done if he was a properly-credentialed member of the Cult of Professional Journalists. He too could have been filing vacuous puff pieces from the Westminister Village, instead of performing actual journalism.

Besides, everyone knows you need proper training to produce high-kwality reportage like this:
[Tim Montgomerie] admits that sometimes the blogging pioneers - untroubled by fears of libel and unchecked by subeditors or lawyers - also get it "badly wrong".
Here's one for the philosophers: is it ironic, or just stupid, that every time highly-trained, professional journalists report on those untrustworthy bloggers, they make the same bogus claim? For the avoidance of doubt, a libel is a libel whether written on the net, printed by the MSM, crotched crocheted into a quilt or urinated into a snowdrift.

Guido doesn't just expose the absurdity of journalism's claim to be a profession, he also exposes the myth that the MSM would just love to turn the heat up on politicians but, gosh darn it, newsrooms just don't have the time or the bodies to do it these days. Apparently, it turns out that finding out what's happening, then writing about it, doesn't take a sack of gold and a cast of thousands after all.

UPDATE

Spellink is hard!

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