The PointofOrder blog had an interesting article the other day – Towards a Reliable Media (please, no snickering)- documenting the claims and counter claims of what it called the “Crump/Hunter Dispute”.

No, the latter is not me, but one Tim Hunter, who is a long-standing NZ Business Journalist, while the former is Philip Crump, better known by his pseudonym, Thomas Cranmer (his site is linked permanently here at No Minister, on the right-hand side of the screen).

The debate was kicked off by this article in Crump’s Substack, Six Golden Rules for Trustworthy Media, which are summarised at the PoO blog, plus a nice synopsis of Crump’s long career as a lawyer:

  1. Curate Stories with Appropriate Prominence.
  2. Write for your most discerning audience.
  3. Present Facts Objectively
  4. Provide New Insights
  5. Communicate With Clarity
  6. Uphold Professional Integrity

Hunter naturally doesn’t agree with the details and published a lengthy response on …. LinkedIn (yes, really). As with Crump’s original you can read it by clicking the link or go to PoO’s summary.

For me though the two key points were seen in two contrasting claims. First from Hunter:

“For a lawyer, Philip Crump sure has a lot of opinions on how to be a journalist.”

Meoooowww, darling. For a dying industry and profession they really do think highly of themselves, don’t they? Moreoever, Hunter’s criticisms reveal little or no understanding, or even knowledge, of just how mistrusted, even hated, his profession is nowadays. It therefore came as no surprise that I didn’t see anything from him that proposed doing anything different; basically it was just, “this is how we’ve always worked and we’ll keep doing that instead of trying the ideas of this….lawyer person”.

The second was a comment on that LinkedIn site, highlighted by PoO, that punctured Hunter’s initial claim of implied supremacy:

I do note however that whether as Thomas Cranmer or under his own name Philip has broken multiple complex, serious stories that other journalists have failed as a body to touch AT ALL.

Exactly, and that has been true since the first social media, blogs, appeared almost twenty five years ago. It’s been twenty one years since Powerline and other blogs destroyed Dan Rather and Mary Mapes for their shit reporting on President Bush, born of gullibility, technological ignorance, and burning bias of hatred against Bush. It certainly buried the sneers of MSM wallahs about “people sitting in their pajamas in a basement” when Rather and Mapes were fired.

Perhaps Hunter never heard of it?

As always, read all three links, starting with the PoO article.