No, journalism is not 'morally indefensible'

Also from Ryu Spaeth's takedown of Ben Smith:

However, every journalist, very much including Smith, at some point will have to face the morally indefensible way we go about our business: namely, using other people to tell a story about the world. Not everyone dupes their subjects into trusting them, but absolutely everyone robs other people of their stories to tell their own.

Oh, bullshit.

At its best, journalism provides journalists a platform not to rob other people of their stories, but to amplify the stories of people who might not otherwise be heard widely. This is especially true of journalists at local papers, who go to church and shop in the same stores and send their kids to the same schools as the people they both serve and cover. It's an imperfect, messily human process, and journalists don't always get it right. I haven't always gotten it right. But to characterize this process, of listening and then passing on what you have heard, as a robbery -- instead of the necessarily flawed process of communication that it is -- is morally obtuse.