The blogger ethics panel joke is even older than Steve Simels, but I suppose it's worth reminding ourselves what the joke was. Back in the early aughts, when the bloogs became a thing, many journalists were Very Concerned that bloggers might have undisclosed financial and ethical conflicts of interest and this was A Very Important Concern and they convened panels of Journalists to discuss Blogger Ethics. I am overdoing the caps to emphasize how dumb this all was, as is the style these days. The joke was that these people wanted randos on the internet who mostly were hobbyists to be held to higher standards than applied anywhere else in journalism. One journalist I talked to (not a bad guy, but dumb about this stuff) seemed to truly believe that editorial page editors fully vetted all their contributors and fully disclosed to readers all relevant conflicts of interest. Donald Trump is the president and we don't even know what his relevant conflicts of interest are.
