Tempting Extensions Unknown

I've long been skeptical of the entire notion of "citizen journalism." But I have just tonight found something out, and I think I have actual news to report.

Not sure how I should play this. It goes all the way to the top.

I also think I may be in some danger. Anyway, hold on for more info as I get it, or can talk about it.

UPDATE. It's about some of John McCain's unsavory political connections -- can't say more right now --

Comments

[Righteous Bubba]

He choked on another pretzel and it was your pretzel and you're on the run cuz of a salted deadly weapon?

[spero]

Whatever happens, don't Trip!

[Big Tex]

So does it involve a dead girl or a live boy?

[Anna Granfors]

Dude. You can't just post something like that and then walk away, unless of course it's foulest irony, of a nature I'm just not getting.

[Ripley]

I have a nagging sense that there will be short skirts and pom pons involved. I hope I'm wrong.

[BigHank53]

Oh, fuck. That was your car I left that videotape in?

Look me up when you get to New Zealand.

[K. Ron Silkwood]

Unsavory? That suggest the Great White Whale of Madison.

[Jemand von Niemand]

It's about some of John McCain's unsavory political connections...

McCain is going to choose Alois Brunner (friend of the secretive German-American beer-brewing families of our High Plains states), as his running mate?

Actually, that wouldn't surprise me. Even McCain taking money from NAMBLA wouldn't do it.

[MikeJ]

Dude, you missed out on so much McCain's handlers have done. To wit:

* Eliminated Iran's strongest enemy
* Drove up the price oil, propping up Iranian government
* Invited an Iranian spy to the State of the Union and had him sit next to the president's wife

[El Cid]

Of course citizens can do journalism. Journalism started out as the hobby of businessmen and other individuals.

All through the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and even 1990s citizens around the country produced some great local and national journalism, alternative and leftie and ethnic and other newspapers, many of them volunteer.

What matters isn't who you are, it's whether or not you follow the rules of journalism.

You're not a citizen journalist just because you write some speculative shit or gossip or half-baked theory or mildly suspicious fact.

You're a citizen journalist when you do the kind of work a real article deserves.

That's it.

That's all there is to it. That's why so many "professional" journalists fail, because they think their identity as professional journalists extends to their work automatically, no matter how badly they flaunt the basic rules of journalism, i.e., Judith Miller, or Fred Hiatt.