THIS ARTICLE IN EDITOR AND PUBLISHER asks “Why do they hate us?” — the press, that is:

The newest polls about the press are discouraging enough to make even H.L. Mencken weep. The public, which had admired us in the months after Sept. 11, has turned against us again. Nearly half those responding in the most recent Pew Research Center poll seem to think that we “don’t stand up for America,” and a majority believe we “don’t care about the people we report on.” Generally, polling numbers have gone back to pre-9/11 levels.

And why could this be? Here’s a clue:

The public loved us most in November, when flags rippled on the corners of TV screens and from on-camera lapels.

Then the story seems to drift into a discussion of how the public doesn’t like the press to ask “tough questions.” But I think that misses the point. The public doesn’t like the press asking dumb-but-slanted questions and pretending that they’re tough questions. Adversarialism for the sake of adversarialism, Reuters-style moral equivalence or bias, and petty kvetching give people the sense that the press sees itself as apart from, and somehow better than, the society that it is in fact a part of, and that readers and viewers are a part of. And people don’t like that. Go figure.

My advice to those who read this article and want to know how to improve the press’s image: read a lot of weblogs. Because webloggers don’t hate the press as such. Heck, if we did, we’d spend our time watching The Simpsons on DVD (I’ve got seasons 1 & 2!).

But you become a weblogger because, fundamentally, you think the press is important, and you love what it does enough to hate to see sloppy and biased work — which unfortunately, you see a lot of even in the elite media. And, yes, people besides webloggers and media watchdogs notice that . Everyone notices it. Maybe when I was a kid people were too unsophisticated to pick up on media bias — or maybe they just lacked the right vocabulary to talk about it — but everyone’s a media critic now. Yet, fundamentally, the big media are still playing double-A ball, in front of major league umpires.

Where the article is dead-on is in recognizing that press freedom is threatened when the public doesn’t respect the press. But here’s a message to journalists: the public doesn’t disrespect you because you’re “too tough” and raise troubling questions they don’t want to think about. The public disrespects you because you are, far too often, sloppy, superficial, and biased. You want more respect, do something about that.

UPDATE: Justin Katz has some similar observations, and notes that the press’s enthusiasm for “campaign finance reform” may account for some of this — he suggests that maybe people just aren’t enthusiastic about free speech for the press when the press has shown itself unenthusiastic about free speech for everyone else.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, maybe stuff like this explains why people don’t like the press.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Howard Owens says I’m wrong — bloggers care about news, not the press. Fair enough, though I think actually we care about both. His comments on the difference between the stories that bloggers think important and those that are beaten to death by Big Media are right on.

OKAY, ONE MORE: Laurence Simon responds, and has links to many other posts responding to this piece.

OKAY, I LIED: A.C. Douglas emails that I should have mentioned Susanna Cornett’s piece on this. I looked at it, and he’s right. And she mentions this post by Toren Smith as the definitive wrapup.