Journalism used to be an honorable profession dating back to the time of the heralds. Journalism is writing history in real time. It isn’t the business of peering backwards through a glass darkly in a retrospective. It isn’t consensus. It isn’t repeating the meme. It isn’t filtered for political correctness or partisanship. It’s raw and, in its pure form, the unvarnished reality – the deeply disturbing photo of a summary execution, the hysterical observation of the conflagration of a crashing Zeppelin or the fearless observation that a government official has violated both the law of the land – even including the Constitution – and international treaties by supplying arms to active criminals in a subversive effort to abrogate the rights of his own citizenry.
Journalism isn’t who you are, journalism is what you do. It is the courage to tell the truth regardless of personal risk. And so it used to be; today though, we live in an age where being a “professional journalist” means having a license to lie...
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