The Definition of a Good Journalist………

When I muse on the difference between a journalist and a stenographer, I can think of no better example than Jason Mojica's paean to Mohammed Fahmy, Jailed Al Jazeera Journalist Is Actually Kind of a Dick:

This may surprise you, but Mohammed Fahmy, the imprisoned Al Jazeera English journalist who on Friday was awarded the World Press Freedom Award, is actually kind of a dick.

And I’m sure he feels the same way about me.

A couple of years before he and his colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed were arrested in Cairo and accused of running a terrorist cell from their rooms at the Marriott, I worked with Fahmy on a story I produced for VICE News. It was July 2011 and the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak earlier in the year hadn’t brought the sea change that Egyptians were hoping for. Protesters were expected to return to Tahrir Square in what was being dubbed, “Egypt’s Second Revolution.” The very short version of this story is that we were having trouble getting all of the elements of the story we were after when we met Fahmy who offered his services as a fixer. Now, we already had a fixer in Cairo, but I was willing to try anything at that point, so I hired Fahmy for a day to see what he could do. He delivered, but he didn’t gel with me and my crew. At the end of a very long day of shooting, we were happy to part ways.

………

He ran the story, names and all, which pissed me off. We traded shitty BBMs [Blackberry Messenger] back and forth, and I came away thinking of him as a pushy, bull-headed bastard who cared more about getting a story out than for the people who that story was about.

In other words, a damn good journalist.

Journalists are people whose jobs it is to find out things that people don’t necessarily want them to find out. That often requires a type of aggression and self-righteous determination that rubs people the wrong way. And that’s one of the reasons we need to change the way we talk about press freedom.

While we like to lionize journalists as noble truth seekers serving the public good, for those on the other side of their aggressive reporting, they are a f%$#ing nightmare. So when journalists get detained, our knee-jerk moral indignation means f%$#-all to the people who see those journalists as a threat. Wagging our finger at them in the hope that they’ll suddenly come around to our way of thinking is naïve.

(%$# mine)

Reporters are supposed to be a pain in the ass.

When reporters become accepted members of polite society, they become eunuchs in the court of the Sultan.  (See Woodward, Robert)

They are supposed to be unsuited for polite society.