we don’t need no goddamn ethics–we’re journalists

Following up on my post condemning the unbelievably naive Nicholas Lemann for being completely unsuited to teaching today’s young people (never mind young journalists), I turn now to condemning some of those young journalists and wannabes themselves.

Gawker got a tip from deep inside the J school on how things stand after the incident in which students purportedly cheated on their ethics exam. The tipster reports that the school is conducting a “witchhunt” and that there’s at least one “rat.” The student’s real concern, however—his/her own future career—is left for last [emphasis added]:

They know they have no proof so the academic affairs committee is trying to get a confession from innocent people by telling them that OTHER people have also given their names, even though we’ve all conferred and no such thing happened. Basically the school is lying to try to get people to confess to something they didn’t do. Columbia is fucking with peoples’ futures and I’m so angry with them, I’d love to see this come to light and embarass them.

Funny, but this student doesn’t seem to have learned anything about ethics.

That’s not nearly as troubling to me as the opinion of Greg Sargent, a young journalist who blogs at Tapped. He’s up in arms that Eason Jordan, formerly of CNN and now the sponsor of Iraqslogger—a one-stop site for all news from Iraq—has invited Michelle Malkin to go to Iraq and search for the oft-quoted-by-the-AP-but-otherwise-invisible Jamil Hussein:

Jordan is using the site to promote, of all people, Michelle Malkin, and is lavishing positive attention on the dishonest attack on the Associated Press that Malkin has been pursuing for weeks now along with a pack of other panting hounds from wingnut blog backcountry. He’s even offered to pay her airfare to Iraq to help her do it.

Eason, this is a very bad idea: It smacks of the worst kind of pandering to some of the ugliest elements in the blogosphere, all in search of a spike in traffic and some cheap publicity. …

The real beef that she and others on the right, such as Little Green Footballs and PowerlineBlog, have with the AP and other news orgs is that they’re bringing imagery and news back from Iraq that is badly eroding public support for their war and the beloved leader who launched it. They are trying to make it as hard as possible for these news orgs to do this through a despicable campaign of bullying and intimidation, and this current crusade is the latest example of this.

Funny, but I thought reporting was about trying to get to the root of a story, particularly a troubling story about reporting a war in which manipulation of the media by the enemy is of deep concern. And I also thought that worrying in advance about whose agenda might be served when the truth is discovered is something for political operatives, not reporters, to concern themselves with.

There are a lot of young journalists blogging at Tapped. If I were them, I’d be worried not about Michelle Malkin going to Iraq but about the attitude of their colleague, which reflects very badly on them.