The Moderate Voice thread I like to has some great variety in it in the comments and the body of the post. I wish people could keep Shuster’s behavior separate from the Clinton reaction. Both are worth analyzing but they are not related, if you know what I mean.

ANyway, great post. I love how the Clinton camp is standing up to this garbage. Put ‘em on notice that this kind of cheap personal attack won’t stand.

Through those ties, he was tapped for a brief spell as a columnist for the San Fran Chronicle, and from there recruited by fellow former politico, Fox’s Roger Ailes, to do a food-fight talk show, later moving to MSNBC. His style to this day bears the taint of Fox’s crude tabloid sensibility. So to serious journalists, he’ll always be suspect, just as (for me, at least) Tim Russert will never quite live down the taint of being recruited by GE’s Jack Welch, who surely didn’t add him to his stable for his sparkling journalistic qualities.

The point that those who come later to this work never seem to really be able to absorb through their skin, alas, is that while true objectivity may be a myth, a principled, disinterested journey toward its rough equivalent for the sake of fairness and intellectual integrity is at the heart of good journalism. My fervent hope is that would-be citizen journalists will find some way to absorb those crucial lessons through non-traditional means. But it will probably be a harder thing to acquire than if it formed the basis of one’s formative professional training. Just as young doctors and lawyers are instilled with the accumulated wisdom and lore of their crafts, so too are journalists endowed with some important reminders of the public trust aspects of their professions.