The New York Times media beat reporters got beaten badly on the Eason Jordan story — by [gasp] weblogs and cable news — and so how do they react? By catching up their readers on what they missed? Of course not. They react by lashing out at weblogs.
This morning’s story by Katharine Q. Seelye, Jacques Steinberg, and David F. Gallagher — under the headline, “Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters” — is another example of the disdain in which many quarters of The Times — not all — hold citizens’ media.
There’s much more, including an observation that the Times reporters cherry-picked quotes from his blog to give a misleading impression of his views, and an open invitation to the Times’ Bill Keller.
UPDATE: Greg Scoblete offers a response to the “salivating morons” line:
Lovelady and the rest of the CJR-set are taking the wrong lesson from Jordan’s demise. The lesson is that many heads are better than one. Distributed intelligence and distributed research trump presumed authority every time. Arguments from authority are no longer enough. “This is CNN” is no longer sufficient. Now you need facts to back up your assertions (and not made up ones, either). . . .
The nasty, ad-hominem push back from Mr. Lovelady simply demonstrates just how out of step he is. This is the argument of an insular clergy: “you do not govern us, we govern ourselves.”
Well, no longer.
I think that’s why they’re so unhappy. Meanwhile, in response to the charge that blogs are “trophy hunters,” Chuck Simmins emails: “We’ve never seen this sort of behavior from Old Media, now, have we?”
Perhaps we should call it Earl Butz’s revenge . . . . But like most bloggers I would have rather seen the videotape made public than see Eason Jordan resign. CNN apparently felt differently.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Don’t miss Tim Blair’s take on the Times article.
MORE: Ed Morrissey has much more, including — as the result of emails back and forth with CJR’s Steve Lovelady — the conclusion that the “salivating morons” quote doesn’t really reflect Lovelady’s view of the blogosphere. Morrissey also observes: “Read the entire New York Times piece. It tends towards a warning to the blogosphere to take care not to go off half-cocked, and that may not be a bad message.”
That’s a good message for everyone, of course, and it’s a message that Eason Jordan should have heeded, too.
STILL MORE: Tom Maguire looks at who’s missing from the Times story:
In the course of emphasizing that the Eason Jordan lynching was engineered by a right wing mob, the Times somehow drops from this story (a) Howard Kurtz of the WaPo, who offers some relatively real coverage here; Rep. Barney Frank, D, MA, who made a cameo appearance in the audience in the Times’ Saturday story (yes, of course he was on the panel); and Sen. Chris Dodd, D, CT, who has now failed to appear in both of the stories offered by the Times, despite his expressions of outrage and calls for the release of the videotape. What does a Democrat from neighboring Connecticut need to do to break into the Times?
Read the whole thing for many other useful insights.