"By playing it safe, they’re making themselves irrelevant.”

Journalist Dan Froomkin, fired by the Washington Post for reasons that many still find hard to fathom, nails the state of modern journalism in an interview with NYU media guru Jay Rosen:

And yet "the sense that, if you have a belief that you publicly espouse, you can no longer be fair about reporting a subject is problematic," Froomkin continued. "Reporters have beliefs, they have values—the key is for them not to let those beliefs affect their reporting. Downie wanted people to disenfranchise themselves." Besides, Froomkin continued, there are principles that journalists do, and more to the point should, stand for—accountability, transparency, fair play, human rights—and "there's nothing wrong with journalists wearing those values on their sleeves."