Thread by @DrVicFielding

I wasn’t planning on having anything more to say about the unsupported #EmmaHusar allegations which served to destroy her career, but it seems I’m going to have to clear some things up thanks to comments by @farrm51 @annabelcrabb on #TheDrum. Thread.

In the discussion of whether journalists should publish allegations before they are proven, and how false allegations can become fact (#fakenews), both took a swipe at Twitter users (the audience) for being responsible for spreading the allegations. Yep, that’s what they said.

@farrm51 specifically called Twitter users ‘digital idiots’ in this swipe. So let me go back a sec. How on earth does a discussion of ‘should the journalist have published?’ become yet another platform to criticise the audience of the news, rather than the journalists?

I should say at this point that both seemed to circle around a statement of criticism of the journalists for reporting the allegations before they were proven, yet they couldn’t quite bring themselves to repudiate actions of a professional colleague. It’s just not done apparently

I have a theory about why journalists find it so hard to say ‘yes, that’s bad journalism, there’s a problem with the way that journalist did their job and this is why....’ It’s because they’re working in a house of cards.

That house of cards is their professionally ideology which differentiates them from us ‘digital idiots’ on Twitter. They believe they’re more objective and less bias than all of us plebs and that they know the truth better than we do. This is their stock in trade.

So, like a plumber who needs you to believe that they are the only one who can fix your toilet, and that you should pay them $300 to do that rather than trying to do it yourself, they need to believe for themselves that their journalism is 100% guaranteed right every time.

If it’s not, if us Tweeps are right when we say ‘that shouldn’t have been published’ and if they admit that to themselves, and to us, they’re scared the whole house of cards will come crashing down.

Things were much easier for them when us plebs had no way of talking back, had no way of complaining, and had no platform to publish our own blog (✋🏻) to write about the same things they’re writing about.

They’re scared if they admit that sometimes their journalism is not perfect, their professional identity will fall apart and they won’t have anything to ‘sell’ to us. So, they have to blame us - their audience - their customers, for any problems with the product, rather than them

The people making the product are blaming us, the people using it, for any obvious flaws in it, because apparently if we just knew how to use it properly, and didn’t share those false allegations they published, everything would be fine.

End.