21 Feb A more thoughtful rebuttal from the Parliamentary Press Gallery

In response to my critique (here and here) of the national news media’s handling of the @vikileaks3o dustup last Friday, CBC’s Kady O’Malley has offered a more thoughtful rebuttal (more thoughtful than this):

Here’s the major flaw in @kempthead‘s thesis re: “Hill journos” allegedly enraged at having “the news cycle snatched from their grasp”… He appears to have mistaken journalists for communications flacks, who *do* attempt to control a news cycle…  Journalists just want news to report. We have no desire to dictate the news cycle, we just hope it takes us someplace good.

To which @DavisvilleHabit tweeted:

That’s a sweeping statement […]

O’Malley again:

Any journalist who aspires to control the news cycle has lost the plot…. Seriously, most of us are chaos junkies. We *love* it when things go exactly the opposite as expected. Especially if it’s pear-shaped…. In fact, if we have a vague kind of raison d’etre, it is thwarting those who DO attempt to control a news cycle…. That’s why the @Vikileaks30 story was covered so heavily, for heaven’s sakes. It was Something Different And Unexpected And Unknown.

[Note: For readability, I have combined several tweets, rather than reproducing them as screenshot. Elipses indicate separate tweets. The order and text are unchanged.]