I give Steve some slack. He's riding out his contract by playing the game. It's too late in his career to
@SykesCharlie it.
1. Opinion journalism is a category in every major journalism contest - column writing, podcasting, editorial writing, etc. Every single credible and significant journalism contest recognizes such categories as journalism.
2. Was Mike Royko a journalist? Of course. How about Mark Twain, Maureen Dowd, Bill Janz, Jim Stingl, Charles Krauthammer, James Causey - are they/were they journalists? All had and have columns. Of course, they’re journalists.
3. The Founding Fathers believed in a partisan press. Benjamin Franklin had a newspaper that published the first editorial cartoon in history. The so-called objective model of journalism came much later in the 1800s with the penny press. It was a marketing tactic. So the idea that journalists can never have opinions was not shared by the Founders.
4. He’d probably consider George Stephanopoulos a journalist. He was Bill Clinton’s press secretary for goodness sake. This never works both ways. No one on the right sees the legacy media as objective anyway. The slant is clear.
5. Steve Scaffidi is a massive clown. He was a politician before going on the radio. He has no background in journalism so why would we think he could define it? Why is a former mayor lecturing journalists about journalism?