The Wicked Witch of the Press speaks

Here's Helen Thomas appearing on the Huffington Post; she is the last member of the press corps who still believes "real" journalists are distinguishable from wannabe blogger-types by their superior ethics.

Do you think technology is changing [journalism]? That a good reporter will always find a venue because there are so many media outlets now?

No, but I do think it is kind of sad when everybody who owns a laptop thinks they're a journalist and doesn't understand the ethics. We do have to have some sense of what's right and wrong in this job. Of how far we can go. We don't make accusations without absolute proof. We're not prosecutors. We don't assume. (Dan Rather and the TNG fake documents, the explosives at al Qaqaa that didn't actually disappear, the TNR Scott Beauchamp fake stories about soldiers' cruelty, the Marine massacre of innocents in that Iraqi village that didn't happen, the corpses stacked like cordwood at the Superdome in 2005, John Kerry's phony record in Vietnam, and the list goes on and on and on-ed.)

So if there's this amateur league of journalists out there, trying to do what you do...

It's dangerous.

Without that amateur league of journalists, it's astonishing to think what the public would NOT know, or what the public WOULD know but is not TRUE.