Here’s a well written fisking of Associated Press CEO Tom Curley’s dishonest apologia for both the AP itself and for the AP’s notorious terrorist-photographer Bilal Hussein, who is in US custody after being caught with a bunch of terrorists and acting like a terrorist.
My first thought when I read this kind of thing is: How stupid do MSM executives think the rest of us are? But of course it’s beyond that point now. The fact that a lot of us have come to assume that MSM reports on partisan topics should be considered bogus until proven otherwise is no longer news. It’s a shame that it’s come to that. Or maybe the shameful thing is how long many of us believed that journalism had been transformed by degreed experts into a prestige profession — one far removed from the antics of The Front Page. But J-schools don’t change human nature, and incentives to cut corners and misuse positions of trust for personal and political gain will always be with us. At least now we have the Internet to help expose some of the worst abuses and provide alternative sources of information.
You link CNN’s site for Curley. Why are we not surprised? Again, access is all & framing artful. This is just a more deadly form of “trust us” about leaks – context, truth, motives are not our business. We are just supposed to accept the frame: 80 journalists have died.