Comment by chiefalchemist
7 days ago
No. But people without ethics, transparency, etc can not be. Again, for all intents and purposes it’s a verb. It’s the actions you take. This thread is filled with references to actions that DQ the person from being a journalist. Continuing to get them the title / reward only encourages bad behavior.
Morally, that's a valid position to take. Pragmatically, I'd call every human who writes for a newspaper like the NYT a 'journalist'.
(Of course, we could extend the same game and deny the moniker of 'newspaper' for a rag like that. But at some point, we are drifting too far from the mainstream accepted definition of words.)
You say mainstream. I say Orwellian. We can’t lower the bar and expect standards to be maintained. It doesn’t work that way. If most them are reporters then call them that. FFS even influencers is more accurate. But journalists? They. Are. Not.