[Milhous]

Nevertheless, there is a reasonable expectation that people who choose to be reporters will use their freedom to do good, not to do bad.

Writing do good stories seems easy enough. Reporters just need to create a perceived evil to righteously rebuke. Reporters with looming deadlines can get a lot of mileage out of cardboard villains. (Cardboard characters keep it simple for the masses). The moral of a do good story with a cardboard villain enables the reimagineering of a formulaic ending where the bad guy redeems himself or dies or something.

Unfortunately, given life's complexity, determining exactly who or what "gets to" play the part of the evil cardboard villain quite often becomes a political decision.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

determining exactly who or what "gets to" play the part of the evil cardboard villain quite often becomes a political decision.

I actually think that the "cardboard villian" is fixed. The "villain" is anyone who raises his profile by actually accomplishing something. Accomplishment threatens the primacy of the criticizing class - reporters most especially, Democrat politicians, unionists, plaintiff lawyers, and (all too often) teachers. People who actually accomplish things set themselves up for second guessing; it is always possible to see in retrospect "where," as Teddy Roosevelt put it, "the doer of deeds could have done them better."

So in that sense the "political decision" of who gets mercilessly criticized by journalism is not so much driven by the desire of the reporter for a particular outcome as by who makes the juciest target for being knocked down a peg or two. And that is always the businessman or the doctor - or the cop or the soldier. Hence, "objective" journalism and its running dog, "liberalism," attack those targets.