Adam McGill of D Magazine was kind enough to link to my previous post, "The Case Against Morally Superior Journalists," on FrontBurner, the magazine's excellent blog. Unfortunately, he also posted this "summary" of my post, as submitted by an anonymous journalist:

SB's post can be distilled down to "PR practitioners and journalists are human, and as such are fallible." There's nothing wrong with that. But then he goes on to describe the false moral high ground journalists claim over their PR counterparts -- get this -- right before he himself stakes out a moral high ground over journalists -- get this, Part II -- right before denying that he is staking out a moral high ground! He truly does belong in PR. Read those last two graphs to yourself. It's like something out of the Onion.

Of the three objections SB has to the craft, only one has to do with actual journalism; the other two deal with anti-journalism. Deciding what your story is before doing your reporting has as much to do with reporting as deciding what your results are before doing your research has to do with science. That takes care of points one and two. Point three, the one that addresses actual journalism, baffles me. No subject in such a situation is required to submit to an interview. If pursuing such a story makes him uncomfortable or compromises the delicate balance of his personal moral framework, then he never should have been a journalist in the first place. The question of whether or not stories of personal tragedy are newsworthy has tied me into neither pretzels nor knots -- and I have done such interviews under the most unsettling circumstances.

To respond to this scribe's complaints in order:

1. I do not think PR people are morally superior to journalists -- far from it. The point of my examples was to show that there are difficult moral and ethical choices to be made in all professions.

2. The suggestion that journalists don't sometimes conduct interviews with a fully formed angle in mind is silly; I don't think the poster actually believes this.

3. The suggestion that certain publications don't sometimes slant their coverage toward the sensational is also silly; whether you blame Rupert Murdoch or prefer to go all the way back to Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, we all know this happens -- and that it's nothing new.

4. The poster is "baffled" by someone who is uncomfortable going to the house of a murder victim's family -- unannounced, uninvited and after several unreturned phone calls. Sorry to be so "delicate."