Kathleen Parker’s chatty-catty column about Journolist tries to end with a Very Special Message about the loss of privacy in our culture. I think that’s a real issue. But Journolist is a simply awful example of it. That doesn’t stop her from trying to turn it into something grand. Parker writes:

In the meantime, we have to ask ourselves: Are we better off never having the ability to speak offhandedly among friends, to say in private what we could never say in public, to think aloud and uncensored?

This is absurd. Talking with 400 people many of whom you do not know (a point Parker concedes) is not a “private” conversation among friends. It’s not even close. It doesn’t even remotely look like one. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an ethical question about what is or isn’t off the record. But friends don’t have journalistic ground rules. And trying to paint Journolist into an intimate conversation among buddies is nonsense on stilts.

And then the kicker:

Or do we resign ourselves to the new reality — that no one is ever to be trusted — and keep our thoughts to ourselves? The answer implied by the events here described suggests a country in which few of us would want to live.

So that’s the choice? A bleak world where anomie reigns, where trust is a forgotten virtue and where our isolated souls roll along like tumble weeds in a barren social desert or a world where we can have friends, communities and rich nurturing conversations and where — natch — Journolist is allowed to thrive?

Does anybody in the world honestly believe the issues here are anywhere close to that grand, the choice that stark? Anyone?