Regular PPRuNers may be aware that I am one of the handful of regular journo visitors here.
The difference between newspaper, TV and radio (and especially Tabloid) journos (including the broadsheet defence correspondents) and the specialists who write for the defence media is that one lot want a story (that's the modern culture of general news organisations) while the other lot want the truth.
It's only slightly unfair to say that one group want to entertain, and the other wants to inform, educate and illuminate.
However you dress it up (and Mr Moncur dresses it well) the Leuchars accident is only ever going to be interesting to his editor if there's a "STORY" - preferably one involving a whiff of scandal or fault. And the pressure of competition means that stories like this can't be properly checked. With the luxury of a weekly deadline (and often longer) I can dig deeper, and if someone else gets a whiff of the story it doesn't matter. I do appreciate James' dilemma, and I don't envy him.
I do agree with him that DPR/DCC/Station PRO/CRO people are seldom as open or as helpful as we might want, and that with a more helpful approach some of the daft stories like Mr Moncur's (if it was daft) would not appear. But at the same time, journos are conditioned to expect to be lied to, and obstructed, and few have the faintest clue as to why there might be an entirely legitimate and explicable reason why Tornado aircrew's names might be witheld at the moment. Nor would they realise that PROs and CROs would not routinely know the cause of an accident, and might only know the quite reasonable line that a BOI was investigating the causes. Red rags to a bull? Only if the bull is painfully ignorant.....
What really grips my sh.it is Mr Moncur's assumption that he has a right (or even a duty) to write this story, and his cavalier willingness to pre-empt the due process of the BOI. I would draw a distinction between those who wanted an answer to real questions surrounding the loss of the Hercules in Iraq (where there was a real concern that there might have been a cover up of a potential structural issue, and where the loss of an aircraft and several crew in combat was of huge public interest) and of wanting an answer to this routine peacetime accident.
We are a broad church, and our congregation consists of some very different animals.
And yet we all bear the same tag of journo..... and we all suffer because of the mistrust and contempt which poor, inaccurate, and sensationalist reporters earn our profession.