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I am perpetually impressed by the astonishing ability of our major news producer elites' ability to simultaneously back two contradictory fallacious arguments:
(1) Your crazy conspiracy theories about how we astoundingly independent journalists could ever, ever be influenced by our social connections with those we cover are utterly and completely wrong, because we have all sorts of fancy mental training to prevent that and also our employers and ethics rules take care of all of that.
And they follow that up with this beauty, demonstrated directly by the segment Glenn quoted:
(2) Our social connections with the people we cover allow us even more independent insight into their duties, because it allows us to understand their awesome, super-fascinating decision-making methods.
It's partly through their constant social interactions with their subjects that journalists -- and more importantly the content controllers such as editors & publishers -- become convinced that the story is not what is actually being done by whom, but the fascinating inner story of the psychological and biohistorical development of some policy, whatever it may be.
