For the Record: Time for Another Blogger Ethics Panel

Press critic and hero of rectificationism Eric Boehlert of Media Matters and more recently his own bloggy Press Run, who died incomprehensibly on Monday in a bike collision with a train on the Montclair-Boonton line near his home in Montclair, New Jersey, at the age of 56. I'm feeling so bad about this. Photo from Salon.

 

"Why ethics matters", please not "why ethics matter". Construing "ethics" as a plural (as in "how many ethics do you have?") is an automatic disqualifier https://t.co/97efItHcTg

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

Imagine seriously talking about "Why physics matter". What is a physic? (In old-fashioned medical practice, it's a medicine—"You must take some physic for that, my lord.") There's a suitable use for a singular "ethic" in modern English, as there is for "aesthetic", but "ethic" is isn't its plural; "an ethic" is ethics focused on a particularly narrow subject matter with a singular set of principles, where ethics is the broad discussion of all the different princples you might adopt.

The real problem with thinking like that of Balderas is the myth of "objectivity" in description of social phenomena, the idea that a journalist can adopt what Rosen calls a "view from nowhere". In fact there isn't a place "outside" of society from which you could observe it.

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

(like NYTimes Peter Baker, proud that he doesn't vote), you're effectively against it, presenting yourself as superior to the masses, AND dishonest. In this way, far from freeing itself from bias, "ethical" journalism of the kind espoused by these guys is dishonest, HIDING bias.

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

A truly ethical journalistic practice is one that acknowledges its bias so the reader can correct for it. (It should also be accurate, scrupulously sourced, and fair to everybody.) RIP Eric Boehlert, who exemplified this so well.

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

View From Nowhere

 

Spectroscope, British Library collections, via SolvingForPattern.

Peter Baker,  the New York Times reporter so devoted to the View From Nowhere that he notoriously refuses even to take sides in secret by casting a ballot in an election, has a characteristic take on the withdrawal from Afghanistan: that angry partisans missed a chance to find a compromise between the extreme positions, that US forces should withdraw or US forces should not withdraw ("All In or All Out? Biden Saw No Middle Ground in Afghanistan."):

“There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict,” Mr. Biden said as the Taliban seized Kabul this month.

Critics consider that either disingenuous or at the very least unimaginative, arguing that there were viable alternatives, even if not especially satisfying ones, that may not have ever led to outright victory but could have avoided the disaster now unfolding in Kabul and the provinces.

More Power to Dr. Krugman!

Pensacola, May 2014, via Washington Post.

Don't know exactly what the program is in this polemic in the Atlantic by Sebastian Mallaby disguised as a review of a new collection of Dr. Krugman's newspaper journalism, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future. But it's kind of peculiar, a review that can't make up its mind, lurching between extravagant praise and angry blame—as in, Krugman "writes amusingly and fluently" but has a "furious and bitter voice". Serially or in parallel? He's a "dazzling academic" but also an "undiscriminating guillotine".

His combination of analytic brilliance and linguistic facility recalls Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes. But Krugman can also sound like a cross between a bloodthirsty Robespierre and a rebarbative GIF. Week after week, he shakes his fist righteously at Republicans and anyone who defends them: You’re shilling for the fat cats. You’re shilling for the fat cats. Over and over. Again and again.

Oh, I get it: Dr. K. is uncivil. He's ought to be a perfect member of the neutral party, the team of the scholarly, with his Nobel and his urbanity. How could he demean themselves by taking some kind of political "side" as if one were better than the other?

Unlike that charming Milton Friedman (whom Krugman always mentions with extravagant respect), whose famous 1970 New York Times Magazine article on businessmen with the gall to talk about the "social responsibility" of corporations says