I’ve known a few news reporters over the years.  They are, for the most part, human like the rest of us; they’re prone to the same sins as all of us.

Now, the news media as a whole has been coasting on a decades-old laurel – the whole “watchdogs of government” thing – that they have largely done a terrible job of earning for the past thirty years (unless Republicans are in office), and a nonexistent one this past six years.

But while the job they do has gone begging, the hubris that they developed over a number of muckraking decades before has not.

A few years back, a newspaper in the New York City metro area put its investigative brawn to use to publish…the names and addresses of legal New York carry permit holders; becasue the public has a right to know about law-abiding people doing legal, unremarkable things.  They were then shocked and horrified when bloggers returned the favor, publishing the editorial staff’s home addresses –  because apparently that provided a “chilling effect”, and the public doesn’t have a right to know that.

And here we are again; the NYTimes reporter who published Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s home address has found her own petard hoisted; bloggers posted her address in Chicago.

And she was reportedly not happy about it: 

In retribution, bloggers found and posted Bosman’s address online, sending the reporter scrambling hysterically for protection from the very people she had sold out — the police.

And apparently, she did so in a none-too-subtle fashion.

“She came in thinking she was Steven Spielberg or something shooting a movie,” a source within the Chicago Police Department was quoted as saying (H/T Western Journalism).

The source confirmed that not only did she grossly exaggerate the threats she had received, but she demanded “top-tier” protection of the sort usually accorded to movie stars and visiting dignitaries.

Because there are crazy people out there, you know.

Police brutality and unaccountability is certainly a story that needs to be covered – although, like most stories that matter, it’s one that the media have left pretty much undisturbed until recently, and one that won’t really be covered at all until a reporter at a major newspaper winds up on the wrong end of a tazer.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, January 6th, 2015 at 8:38 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.