The question of whether bloggers are journalists is a tired debate. So I’ll make this point short and brief.

Wired has a pretty good article about the FCC launching a new competition to develop apps that would allow consumers to “spy” on their mobile carriers to ensure that the carriers are not throttling or limiting bandwidth and services. This is important in the Net Neutrality debate, for sure, but let me point out something that just sits entirely wrong with my journalistic mind.

Author Ryan Singel does a very good job describing the situation, reporting the facts and injecting very mild bias (I’m okay with that) into his post. Then he gets to the last line of the second to last paragraph (bolded mine):

Hackers and thinkers have until June 1 to submit their work. Both a jury of experts and the public will get to decide the winners, who, as a prize, get to visit D.C. on the FCC’s dime and eat at a banquet with FCC head Julius Genachowski — if he’s not been eaten alive by then by the ascendant Republican congress for imposing rules on the nation’s powerful telecom companies.

Whaaa? Did I miss the point in the article where Wired moved from describing an entirely appropriate tech policy story to angsty political hyperbole? Credibility lost. Try again.