Can You Apply This Thinking to Journolist?

I think you can...

Mayor and police chief encourage us to see this as minor:
"The sad reality is that some people are going to violate their oath of office," Mr. Kelly said at the news conference, adding: "I would submit to you that it is a very small minority. But if you had 1 percent of 50,000 people you would have 500 people."

That may well be true--but it misses the point. If you own a restaurant and your customers see a rat, claiming that on 364 out 365 days of the year, your facilities are vermin-free, will do very little to assuage them or mollify your critics. They will likely avoid your establishment as much as humanely possible. This would strike most people as sensible.

In terms of the police, one must factor not just cops who are crooked, but those who think it's appropriate to pepper-spray people for fun, those who leave people in detention over a missing ID, those who kill innocent people by mistake. You are then talking about something a bit more dangerous than the One Percent rule implies.

That is the terrain. I accept it as a result of democracy. I also accept that communities publications which enjoy an overexposure to this privileged One Percent, will tend to be less likely to regard the police press as a legitimate branch of law enforcement source of news, and more likely to regard them as another neighborhood crew well-paid lobbying group, empowered with the right to legally kill (added: reputations), and suffer few obvious consequences. One can see how such a people might make the wholly sensible decision to refrain from speaking too much with this One Percent, as surely as a patron might decide to avoid your mostly vermin-free establishment.

I'm sure plenty dismiss this as trivial, what it looks like. I'm sure, some days, these people might indeed practice "honest journalism".

But like that restaurant with rats,
once your name gets tainted, who can trust you anymore? And you do wonder, honestly, if the news media hadn't proved so ... corruptible, would we be in the foreign-policy and economic mess we are in today?

Krugman, for one, is always bleating about how nobody listens to him much anymore. Do you think he can make the link, and at least understand why or how, he's put his own scholastic work in jeopardy because he consented to be on Ezzie's "coolkids!" list in "fixing" the news, instead of accepting the job as it is: to impartially report, and ask honest questions, analyze the facts honestly, then come back with honest answers, outside of the pre-selected expert white people cabal (plus Ta-Nehisi!, that Black Panthers son of a gun...)