MSM/DNC Am I Missing Something Here?

[Annie]

I fail to make sense of the argument. Maybe I am unwinding too much, end of school year and all???


http://hughhewitt.com/#postid1676

Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Posted at 12:15 PM, Pacific

Defensive, arrogant, or just dumb? You decide:

The New York Times's Tim Golden on Glenn Reynolds, from CJR Daily:

MB: A few conservative bloggers and pundits have questioned the timing of the [Bagram] series. Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) went as far as suggesting that The New York Times was trying to avert attention from the Newsweek ordeal by running it. What would you say to these critics?

TG: I am reluctant to respond to people who call themselves by names like "Instapundit." I certainly support scrutiny of the press; the Times is a big, powerful institution and I think it should be accountable to the public. But a lot of our self-appointed critics don't make much of an effort to base their opinions on facts. Nor do they seem to understand much about the way that newspapers work.

considering what he 'just' said???To assert that Glenn doesn't know much about the way newspapers work is just silly, and tells us Mr. Golden doesn't know much about Glenn. This is just one more exmple of a standard response from journalists facing criticism --"the critic doesn't know what we do" defense. The refusal to recognize the news consumers' deep skepticism of MSM guarantees a diminishing market share.

UPDATE: I launched the show today by asking Mark Steyn what he thought of Golden's slam on Instapundit. Here's the exchange:

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a story about Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, where prisoners were beaten and died, and the New York Times got some criticism from Glenn Reynolds , myself and others. And the Columbia Journalism Review caught up with the...Tim Golden, the author of that report, and mentioned the Glenn Reynolds story to him. And this is what he said. I am reluctant to respond to people who call themselves by names like Instapundit. I certainly support scrutiny of the press. The Times is a big, powerful institution. I think it should be accountable to the public. But a lot of our self-appointed critics don't make much of an effort to base their opinion on facts, nor do they seem to understand much about the way that newspapers work. Now, Mark Steyn, is that defensive arrogant? Or just dumb on the part of a New York Times reporter, vis-à-vis Glenn Reynolds?

MS: Well, I think it's all three. I mean, Glenn Reynolds is a law professor. What's interesting about some of the people who've emerged on the internet as the go-to bloggers, are that they're...a lot of them are lawyers. You, yourself, the guys at Powerline , and Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit . And often these fellows are just a lot sharper at making an argument than your average journalist is. And the reality of the situation is that you can criticize Glenn Reynolds for a lot of things, but you can't criticize him for not being fact-based. If you go to Instapundit.com every morning, and about twenty times during the day, you can see updates every twenty minutes it seems, he...the one thing he isn't short of is facts. He's got links to this, links to that. He's got both points of view. He's got several points of view. And I think this sort of clubbiness, the guildness, you know, the journalistic profession, it sounds to me like Detroit in the late 70's. It doesn't understand it's being out-maneuvered by people who are nimbler and quicker and think on their feet. And it sounds like sort of unionized backwater, and it's personally an embarrassment to me. I love newspapers. I love newsprint. I love those really cheap newspapers where half of it comes off on your fingers as you're reading it at breakfast. But these guys are making themselves an embarrassment.

The full transcript of the interview is at Radioblogger.com.

BTW: No response yet at CJR Daily on the Navasky report earlier today.