Is Brendan Kiley A Wrong-Headed Asshole?

Over at Just Wrought, NewsWrights Producer and playwright Paul Mullin summarizes the a.WAKE.ning event we did last week. We had a short performance from The New New News and a really excellent panel discussion featuring many working journalists.

The most lively exchange of the night, as Paul writes, was between Art Thiel and Brendan Kiley (emphasis mine):

Several good friends gave me their feedback in the days after and nearly all of them specifically mentioned the earnest and well-argued exchange between Art Thiel and Brendan Kiley regarding the definition of a journalist. Is it, as Art argued, an expert in a certain field or, per Brendan, an aggressive novice? One friend clearly felt Brendan played the wrong-headed asshole in the debate; the other friend, however, remarked on how freaked out he was by what he viewed as Art’s vehement defensiveness.

As fashionable as it is to shit on Brendan Kiley, I actually want to jump in and defend him from this anonymous source.

Kiley's point wasn't exactly that the ideal journalist is an aggressive novice. His point was that the defining characteristic of a great journalist is courage, contra Thiel's contention that the defining characteristic is expertise. But, in fairness, Kiley didn't do a terrific job of articulating that idea.

It seemed to me that both Kiley and Thiel were describing a journalistic ideal through the frame of their own self-perception. Art Thiel is clearly an expert. Kiley is, by his own admission last Monday, not a trained journalist, and when engaging in long-form pieces like his recent series about tainted cocaine, not an expert either.

I actually agree with both men. My ideal journalist is a person who is both expert and courageous: people like Charlie Savage and Jane Mayer. These are the heroes that bring dark deeds to the light.

So, no, Brendan Kiley wasn't wrong. He just wasn't completely right.