FinchAre there times I miss the excitement of working in news? Yes.
Would I go back? Hell naw. The hours suck, HR is a joke - and you've got loads of social climbers with fscked up priorities.
Like how is it "ethical" to say journalists can't exercise their right to free speech as a private citizen? Because lying trolls might point to that as a sign of bias? They're going to cry bias anyway. They're already doing it, and have been doing it for years. That policy has clearly failed.
It also suggests a very privileged point of view, to treat politics as something purely academic; like you are personally insulated from the consequences. By forcing young would-be journalists to choose, you're filtering out marginalized groups and creating an institutional bias.
The policy is, ironically, unethical.
Black Lives Matter protests forced NPR to walk back that policy a bit, but was rightly criticized for not doing enough.
TBF, in the era of social media, it's also a bit outdated and doesn't reflect how people actually consume news. They don't go to one outlet for everything, they click whatever's shared by their friends/mutuals. Trust is derived more from their friends' approval of the article.
Half the time, they don't know anything about the outlet... and that's how all your boomer relatives end up sharing "news" from the Heritage Foundation.
If someone's going through all the trouble to dig up dirt on a reporter, it's for a reason.
We once had a group of "police supporters" try to get a guy fired for stuff mildly critical of police and the war in drugs that he posted on Facebook. Someone screenshot it and passed it around.
He wasn't even a reporter/producer. Just production stuff. No impact whatsoever on the content.