Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism
I feel like the conversation is lacking a journalist point of view so I&#x27;m going to pitch in :) I usually don&#x27;t say anything in this kind of debate (especially on Twitter ;) ) because it&#x27;s pretty useless, but I love reading the community here and it&#x27;s the first time that a debate disppoints me. I feel like it&#x27;s one sided and completly lacking the usual counter-argument and debate. Also, bear with me if I make english mistakes - I&#x27;m french and it&#x27;s not my native langage.<p>First I&#x27;d like to adress there&#x27;s very different kinds of journalism, different set of skills associated with it and of course, a company they work for. As a job, working for the New York Times, for a local journal, for a tech magazine or for travel channel is completely different. I don&#x27;t think people realise how different the job actually is from one media to the other. You can&#x27;t say &#x27;journalists&#x27; the same way you can&#x27;t say &#x27;engineers&#x27; because there&#x27;s people doing software, people doing tests, people building machines, people advising companies and many other people doing many other things and having no idea how to do some other engineer job because it is... entirely different. We&#x27;re not interchangeable and we don&#x27;t all do the same job at all.<p>All medias are also different. Which implies different owners, rules, and bosses. As a journalist, you&#x27;re like everyone else : you&#x27;re an employee. You can have ethics, you can have thoughts or a list of rules. At the end of the day, it&#x27;s a job and if your boss asks you to do something completly stupid, you can either say no, loose that job and possibly die of hunger. Or you roll with it and hope very very hard it will not stay on the internet. (Spoiler alert : it will and you&#x27;ll be ashamed of it all your life.) You do have rights in some countries; but first, like many rights, not everyone know them; and second, those rights don&#x27;t necessarily protect you. Maybe the media can&#x27;t fire you right away or because you refused working, but a few months later, when they&#x27;re considering reconducting your contract, you&#x27;ll just get cut. It&#x27;s just sad math. Not everyone can afford to be a hero.