{"id":50264,"date":"2015-01-06T08:38:45","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T14:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50264"},"modified":"2015-01-06T09:31:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T15:31:00","slug":"our-new-brahmins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50264","title":{"rendered":"Our New Brahmins"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve known a few news reporters over the years. \u00a0They are, for the most part, human like the rest of us; they’re prone to the same sins as all of us.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But while the job they\u00a0do\u00a0<\/em>has gone begging, the hubris that they developed over a number of muckraking decades before has not.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0They were then shocked and horrified when bloggers returned the favor, publishing the editorial staff’s home addresses<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0\u00a0because apparently that provided a “chilling effect”, and the public doesn’t have a right to know\u00a0that<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And here we are again; the\u00a0NYTimes<\/em> reporter who published Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s home address has found her own petard hoisted; bloggers posted her address in Chicago.<\/p>\n

And she was reportedly not happy about it:\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

In retribution, bloggers found and posted Bosman\u2019s address online, sending the reporter scrambling hysterically for protection from the very people she had sold out \u2014 the police.<\/p>\n

And apparently, she did so in a none-too-subtle fashion.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe came in thinking she was Steven Spielberg or something shooting a movie,\u201d a source within the Chicago Police Department was quoted as saying (H\/T Western Journalism).<\/span><\/p>\n

The source confirmed that not only did she grossly exaggerate the threats she had received, but she demanded \u201ctop-tier\u201d protection of the sort usually accorded to movie stars and visiting dignitaries.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because there are crazy people out there, you know.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve known a few news reporters over the years. \u00a0They 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50264"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50266,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50264\/revisions\/50266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}