NOT A JOURNALIST, JUST SOME GUY

In a Pure Poison post titled "Remember when journalists gave subjects an opportunity to respond to allegations before publication?" Jeremy Sear remarks on his new-found journalistic ethics and powers:

I may have learned some bad habits from the example set by the previous “journalists” [Bolt and Blair] we were watching. Also, it hadn’t clicked that, unlike when I was just some guy with a blog, I can now actually ring the subject of a piece and say “it’s Jeremy from Crikey” and they’ll answer the phone.

So when Jeremy can't find an email address for Virginia Haussegger he gets on the phone to give her an opportunity to clarify her position on banning burqas, right? Wrong, Jeremy goes to her blog and lodges a comment not under his real name but as anonymouslefty. He then publishes her unscrupulously elicited response at Pure Poison and has a big sad at Haussegger refusing to post or answer an additional anonymous comment. Sadly, sites such as Crikey are meant to be the future of journalism.

Update: As a journalist Jeremy should know his ethical obligations:

Identify yourself and your employer before obtaining any interview for publication or broadcast.

The PP boyz continue to play by their own rules.

Update II: Jeremy points to an ethical lapse by The Australian:

They have now removed the above paragraph from the linked obituary. It does not include an acknowledgement of this fairly major change.

This from a guy who removed his blog from Google's cache in order to hide his errors, alters his posts without notification, and silently adjusts his own comments. What a joke.