I love a good journalism spat as much as the next gawping bystander. Here’s one in the Israeli media featuring columnist Nahum Barnea. It takes a while to get into its stride, but this is how it ends:

Much can be said about journalism: about its shallowness, about the fact that it often provides free publicity for media advisers and public relations agents, about its over-reliance on leaks from the police, but very few journalists have been convicted on corruption charges. Even though anyone can be a journalist – and this is a basic principle of a profession that is designed to ensure freedom of expression – very few professions have a natural selection process that is as effective. Anyone can begin to be a journalist, but few remain. Above every reporter is an editor, above every editor is another editor, and this professional hierarchy quite successfully weeds out the poseurs and the slackers and the liars and the ones who are corrupt. That is how it usually works, until a journalist attains such a senior and respected status, truly a guru in his own eyes and in the eyes of those around him, that no editor dares tell him when he has written a column that is an embarrassment to himself and his profession.

That is how it happens that pieces, written by people whom editors trust but which should never have been published, get into the newspaper and specifically onto the respected op-ed pages. That is what happened last week to Nahum Barnea.