Thread by @simonmaginn

Obviously, as adults, we understand that journalists work for businesses which have editorial agendas, and are not free to just say anything they please.
Journalists have careers, mortgages, commitments. They’re not going to jeopardise all that.

But they’re now in an unenviable position, the honest ones I mean (if such exotica exist at all). In being required to peddle a narrative that has been wholly discredited, they’re being required to sacrifice their integrity: their self-respect.

Only the most hardened and cynical will be able to do this without some internal disquiet. The rest must, surely, be horribly aware of what they’re doing: denying the evidence, not just of their own eyes and ears, but of the eyes and ears of those who read and hear what they say.

Self-respect, once traded away, can’t be earned back. The journalists who’ve sold their self-respect have lost perhaps the most essential quality any journalist worth the name must have: that they report truthfully. Ours do not, can not. They know it, we know it.

I’m naive enough to believe that not all journalists go into the profession cynically determined to lie. I think most think they’re honest.

But peddling the ‘crisis’ narrative is not honest, and, post #LabourFiles, it is simply impossible to continue without abandoning self-respect altogether.
Just empty voices, paid to lie.
Unenviable.

#ItWasAScam