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Comment by jgershen | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR - "Tu quoque."

Additionally, when I read Kara Swisher's article in AllThingsSD, the next thing I read was her own disclosure (http://allthingsd.com/about/kara-swisher/). It left me with the impression that she takes journalistic integrity very, very seriously (maybe even too seriously, honestly). Arrington's self-righteous, dismissive diatribe here leaves me with exactly the opposite impression about him.

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I came to say exactly this. TechCrunch's constant dramas feel like I'm watching a soap opera of some sort in the name of getting more viewers. I go to a 'news' site to read news and maybe some opinion pieces every once in a while. But, TechCrunch's language and these frequent diatribes are not journalistic whatever Arrington says.

Fully agreed. Which leaves me slightly annoyed each time HN falls for it and pumps TechCrunch to the top of HN.

And then I can't refrain from posting about it, and then I lose karma because people tell me I can just ignore those headlines and scroll by. Not so, people — yes, I can try to ignore those dramas, but I feel like they take away a little bit of our hacker souls each time they make it to the top.

I don't think an article going to the top of HN means "We as a community agree with this." Rather, I think it means "We as a community think this is worth reading and/or discussing." And many of TechCrunch's articles, while being of questionable journalistic value (and that's being generous), they sometimes are worth reading and discussing.

Like this one. I think that Arrington is acting like a 10 year old, but I also think his post is worth reading and discussing.

Right, she has a very wordy disclaimer, but how is her disclaimer different from an investment disclaimer? Over the past 8 years or so every other story Kara wrote was about Yahoo while she almost never wrote about Google even though Google arguably was much more newsworthy over that period. It is hard to believe that her relationship with a Google exec didn't have something to do with that.

Utterly agree. Swisher's measures are draconian. And Arrington comes off like an impudent 17-year-old here.

Its important to remember that Kara Swisher is just an employee, one who draws a salary, and therefore doesn't have an ego the size of Neptune. Arrington is a master of the universe. You can't expect him to be constrained by anything resembling ethics.

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