Losing your job is a terrible thing, and can totally fuck up your life. Nobody likes it when factories are closed down, or businesses go bust, and hard workin' folk are kicked out on their arse. Unless they're fucking journalists, of course. Fuck those guys.
Oh sure, there are plenty of furrowed brows when there are mass layoffs at the biggest media organisations, (although several TVNZ reporters had to go on Twitter last week and remind some smartarses that they are making fun of actual people whose lives have been turned upside down by the latest round of redundancies), but if you read too many comments or tweets or other unasked-for bollocks, people should be fired all the fucking time, for the smallest of reasons.
Leave a typo on a headline for 30 seconds, and someone will tell you that you should be fucking fired. Misspell a name, and someone will tell you that you should be fucking fired. Write a story criticising anything, and someone will tell you that you should be fucking fired.
It's not confined to just journos, of course. Any kind of job that is even partly in the public eye is up for that kind of scrutiny – sportspeople, politicians and big business leaders are always fending off that kind of criticism. They all, of course, get paid significantly more than reporters, and always have some kind of golden parachute, because they have jobs that factor that risk of instant dismissal into their remuneration packages, while journos are kicked out on their arse, and have to instantly scramble about for another low-paying gig.
But heckling for some journo's head after they have made a genuine mistake is both mean and counter-productive, because human beings make mistakes. It's what we do, and it's the ability to learn from mistakes that makes us better human beings. If you keep fucking up, then you're a lost cause, but you'll never get anywhere in this life without making some kind of embarrassing and shameful screw-up.
This was seen last year, when a TV3 journo lost her job after making an awful mistake at a Reserve Bank lock-up. She was duly humiliated by her peers after messing up decades of trust between the Reserve Bank and the wider media, but she wasn't given a chance to learn anything, because she was shit-canned from her job, even though there were plenty of more experienced hands through which that information leaked out.
Nobody learned anything. Nobody ever fucking learns anything on a scorched earth policy.
There will never be an infallible system, thick futurists predict a time when it's all aggregated by automatic systems, but technology isn't going to save journalism, because it can't learn from its fuck-ups like human beings can. Consistent incompetence should never be acceptable, but we've got to give people the chance to make their own mistakes.
- Katherine Grant
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