[tptacek]

The logic you've provided says nothing about whether we should condemn Alex Jones, so I'm not clear what point you're trying to make. Unless you think we should be slow to condemn people who arrange for the harassment of parents whose children were murdered by a gunman in their elementary school. But that seems like an implausibly villainous thing for anyone on HN to believe.

[SuoDuanDao]

My point is, he seems to be held to a higher standard than 'mainstream' journalists, despite the fact that these mainstream journalists send signals that they should be taken seriously and he does not. That sticks in my craw.

[pvg]

he seems to be held to a higher standard

He's not. Judith Miller was fired from NYT ending her career as a reporter within a couple of years of her original Iraq reporting. Alex Jones continues to make a living being a repugnant human being.

[tptacek]

Honestly, you're dignifying this argument. Judith Miller probably believed the story she was selling about Iraqi WMDs, and in the cause itself. She was wrong. Alex Jones deliberately harassed the parents of first graders who had been crowded into a coat closet and shot at close range. This is the moral difference between a negligent doctor and a serial killer.

The distinction is especially material here, because this is the standard-issue message board argument against journalism, or "the mainstream media": that it must be conducted at the highest standards of scrupulous accountability, a standard far higher than any of us hold our own work to (I like to call this "The Djikstra Amnesia Effect"). And if it isn't, its practitioners are no better than Alex Jones.