Should the media have .. simply chosen not to report it? ""Censor"" mentions of "freedom fries"?
Is the BBC article itself "denouncing and shaming"? Or just the Republican it's quoting?
Investing into shitty companies will make you loose your investment. Why should this be different with ideas?
To extend your metaphor, if I invest in a bad company, sure, my finances will suffer. But if it were that easy to tell which companies were bad there'd be no reason to invest at all. People who bet against the crowd and are right are generally considered heroes. I agree there should be a cost to trying to be a hero, but I don't think we currently have enough of them and I'm leery of making it harder to be one.
He's not. Judith Miller was fired from NYT ending her career as a reporter within a couple of years of her original Iraq reporting. Alex Jones continues to make a living being a repugnant human being.
The distinction is especially material here, because this is the standard-issue message board argument against journalism, or "the mainstream media": that it must be conducted at the highest standards of scrupulous accountability, a standard far higher than any of us hold our own work to (I like to call this "The Djikstra Amnesia Effect"). And if it isn't, its practitioners are no better than Alex Jones.