I speak as someone who spent several years as a freelance magazine columnist and got quite a close look at how the news is made. What makes you think I'm insulting journalists?

Moreover, a short sound bite isn't the place for nuanced analyses of how the media works. But it is maybe the right place to try and help people who're feeling overloaded right now by the glut of bad news spinning up around the bombings in Boston. Not to mention the other bomb deaths of April 15th -- Iraq (55), Afghanistan (37), Somalia (30), Syria (18), and Pakistan (4).

He's making criticism of the media as a whole. It's not an indictment of the individuals as much as it is the system although the individuals are complicit in creating the atmosphere & programming.

They might "care" about their work, but the fact that they all-too-commonly deteriorate into fear-mongering & tragedy porn means nothing more than a startup with great employees and really nice guys with great intentions who fail to create revenue.

> There probably won't be any meaningful updates for a couple of days: but the TV channels and newpapers have to fill the dead air somehow, to keep the eyeballs they've attracted on the advertisements, so they cobble together anything they can grab—usually talking heads speculating without benefit of actual information.

Calling out people for doing a poor job of their job isn't being "mean" as much as it is stating facts - no matter how much said employee "cares" about their work.