Also, if mocking the people you cover disqualifies you from reporting, why wasn't the entire Washington press corp fired for their open mockery of Al Gore? Why does the post only find private mockery so objectionable.

In a stunning display of self-unawareness, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg pointed to last week's forced "resignation" by Dave Weigel from The Washington Post as evidence that the Post, "in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training."  Goldberg then solemnly expressed hope that "this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards."  Numerous commentators immediately noted the supreme and obvious irony that Goldberg, of all people, would anoint himself condescending arbiter of journalistic standards, given that, as one of the leading media cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq, he compiled a record of humiliating falsehood-dissemination in the run-up to the war that rivaled Judy Miller's both in terms of recklessness and destructive impact.

Except unlike Miller, who was forced to leave the New York Times over what she did, and the NYT itself, which at least acknowledged some of the shoddy pro-war propaganda it churned out, Goldberg has never acknowledged his journalistic errors, expressed remorse for them, or paid any price at all.  To the contrary, as is true for most Iraq war propagandists, he thrived [despite] as a result of his shoddy record in service of the war.  In 2007, David Bradley -- the owner of The Atlantic and (in his own words) a former "a neocon guy" who was "dead certain about the rightness" of invading Iraq  -- lavished Goldberg with money and gifts, including ponies for Goldberg's children, in order to lure him away from The New Yorker, where he had churned out most of his pre-war trash.  

[snip]

To see what a representative blight on journalism Jeffrey Goldberg is, one need not go back several years.  Just look at what he did in the past several days when lamenting the erosion of journalistic standards while dancing on Dave Weigel's grave.  In his first post arguing that Weigel's hiring evinced the Post's journalistic decline, Goldberg relied upon "one of [his] friends at the Post," to whom he granted anonymity to trash Weigel as an "idiot" and someone who has "destroyed" the paper's reputation.  Just think about that:  in the very same post where Goldberg pretentiously grieved for the collapse of journalistic standards, his "source" was a cowardly "friend" of his at the Post who was granted anonymity solely to spit out catty, petulant name-calling.  Is that supposed to be journalism:  granting anonymity to your friends to puke up conclusory condemnations of other reporters?  That's like lamenting the decline of American journalism while quoting the answers provided by one's Oujia Board.

Goldberg's second post on the topic was even worse:  he quotes still more cowardly, anonymous friends of his at the Post complaining about "the serial stupidity of allowing these bloggers to trade on the name of the Washington Post," that "they hurt the newspaper when they claim to be reporters," that Ezra Klein is "just an absolute partisan. If this is where journalism has to go, so be it, but I don't want to go there," and that Weigel and Klein suffer from a "lack of toilet-training" and are "embarrassing."  Think about that:  at the very same time that he righteously sermonized on the need to elevate journalistic standards, Goldberg turned his Atlantic blog into a anonymous bulletin board for multiple friends to do nothing but spit petulant playground epithets with absolutely no accountability.  That's like writing solemn sermons on the sanctity of human rights while you simultaneously poke someone's eyes out with a dull pencil.

Even Goldberg's backtracking later in the day was itself fueled by full-scale journalistic sloth and shoddiness.  Did Goldberg reconsider his condemnation of Weigel and Klein based on the flagrantly irresponsible act of relying upon the insults of his anonymous friends?  No.  It was the opposite.  Other anonymous friends of his -- "a couple of people I know and respect" -- called him to say his criticisms of Weigel were "misplaced."  Virtually the entirety of Goldberg's multi-post discussion that day was driven by nothing more than what his nameless Important Friends told him to think.

The anonymous reporter would argue that all you really need to know what is going on is WaPo, WSJ, and possibly the NYT if still hungry for news.

It is a self serving definition of the center, and a general slam at bloggers who must be a threat.  

"What you see is news.  What you know is background.  What you feel is opinion."
    - Lester Markel, late Sunday editor
      of The New York Times.

Hat tip to Urgent Agenda.

If the newspapers want to become trusted they must remove any and all connections to any opinion vehicles. That would mean no editorial pages. It would also mean that the reporters would be restrained from expressing their opinions in any medium.

Now, considering that every definition of a profession includes meeting criteria that further include courses in history and ethics of a field, what does that tell us about journalism?  Still (and actually even more so these days, it seems, with more emphasis on technology courses) a trade, a craft in which website programs have replaced earlier cut-and-paste skills, that's all -- so still not a profession.