If Jay wants something other than a mirror, I don’t know what it is.

I’ll agree that the wording at the end of the Preston interview (which it wasn’t supposed to be) was awkward, but never did I say what you quoted me as saying.

So you’re indulging in hyperbole with my reputation. Not a great thing to do — do it with your own, and if you want to persist, do it somewhere else. It’s nasty. We try here to give people the benefit of the doubt, not overstate their mistakes.

And if you have more to say please introduce yourself.

1. I’d like to see Dave come up with a new metaphor to replace “news = mirror.” Every time Jay presses him on what it means, he ends up backing away from it and generally agreeing to Jay’s vision of what news is and what journalists do. I’m guessing that Dave has used the metaphor for so long that momentum and lack of a better alternative, rather than utility, are the reasons he keeps using it.

2. It also seems like Dave lets his personal hobbyhorses and past bad experiences color the discussion a bit too much. I like good, old-fashioned rant about something stupid (SUL) as much as the next guy, maybe more. And there can be great value in generalizing from one’s personal experiences (sources go direct). But Dave can sometimes fall into a bit of “why doesn’t X recognize my genius!?” I would argue that you can see this in the last podcast with Jennifer Preston. Rather than using the time to have an interesting discussion — I was looking forward to exploring how Twitter lists were allowing us to see what news-as-curation looks like, what a more robust list feature would add, how such lists could be the foundation for a checkbox news system — we get Dave and Jennifer butting heads on who gets to write for the NY Times.

Monday morning, about the same time the RBTN #33 was set to air on the east coast, jay twittered a reference to the need for a philosophy of journalism http://chronicle.com/article/We-Need-Philosophy-of/49119/ .

He surfaced his concern again during the broadcast, when he charged that the inability or refusal to call bullshit on public figures and institutions constituted absolute dereliction of journalistic duty.

In “On Bullshit,” Princeton emeritus professor of philosophy Henry G. Frankfurt defined the essence of bullshit as “this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are.”

Frankfurt argues that bullshit is far worse than lying, leading as it does to the eventual disregard for the realness of reality.

“Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully . . . . The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

Following Frankfurt and Rosen, bullshit is revealed as antithetical to the democratic project that lies at the heart of true journalism and the inability to call bullshit as disqualifying condition for journalism.

Yet as Marc Cooper recently asked “if it is biased for a reporter to call an obviously ignorant pol ignorant. Media don’t hesitate to use “smart” or “brilliant” to describe politicians. Why not ignorant? http://bit.ly/4dfdEs

Why not is a question worth raising again and again. It is the beginning of accountability.