Journalism fail

 I've never met Emily Wilder, and it's unlikely I ever will. But I'd hire her in a second if I ran a newsroom somewhere.

Her bosses at the Associated Press are another matter. 

Them, I'd show the road for lacking a couple essentials any journalist should possess: An understanding of the profession, and a spine.

The Blob doesn't often set aside Sportsball matters, but today seems the day for it.  Journalism was my trade for close to 40 years, after all. I know a little about it.

What I know about Emily Wilder is she is remarkably astute for a young woman barely out of college. And I know this because of what she tweeted that likely got her fired as an AP news associate two weeks after she was hired.

What she tweeted was American news organizations reporting on the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict invariably skew the way they present news of that conflict. It's subtle, she says, but it gives away their bias nonetheless.

"'Objectivity' feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report the news implicitly stake a claim," she tweeted. "Using 'israel' but never 'palestine,' or 'war' but not 'siege and occupation' are political choices -- yet media makes those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased."

OK, first things first: Emily Wilder is absolutely right about this.

(Except, perhaps, for the "objectivity" part. Objectivity doesn't exist. Everyone, including journalists, are human beings who have worldviews shaped by their own experiences. So what a journalist should strive for is not objectivity but fairness, because the latter is achievable and the former is not.)

Now where were we?

Oh, yes. Emily Wilder is absolutely right.

And the fact she was fired for it proves it.

Now, the AP won't say it was the aforementioned tweet that got her fired, corporations being notoriously lily-livered about revealing such details. But if it was, it wasn't because she violated AP's social media policy banning political comment. It was because she was again, absolutely right -- and news organizations also are notoriously thin-skinned about having their flaws exposed in absolutely right ways.

So they fired her for "clear bias" because they were biased themselves. Ain't that rich.

She also was fired because right wing media outlets -- among them, hilariously, Fox "News", a propaganda organ masquerading as a news organization -- raised holy hell over Wilder's alleged anti-Israel bias, even though Wilder is herself Jewish. In response, AP  sacrificed Wilder to the cancel culture gods.

Not exactly a profile in courage, if you ask me. I imagine somewhere in the Great Celestial Newsroom, Ed Murrow just lit up another Chesterfield and muttered a few choice oaths.

Of course, the AP will point out Wilder herself admitted violating the social media policy, but that's nothing but a smoke screen. Truth is, challenged by the bullies of the right, they  ran like Forrest Gump.

What they should have done instead is sit down with Wilder privately, go over the company policy again (which technically she didn't violate, because she was tweeting about news coverage, not politics) and tell her not to do it again.

And then?

And then, they should have told Fox "News" and the rest of 'em to go whiz up a rope. 

Back in the day, this is exactly what any editor worth the name would have done. But we're no longer back in the day.

Ed Murrow is dead, after all.