MEDIA BASHING
Glenn Reynolds replies to my item below.
UPDATE: Virginia Postrel doesn't think this is a positive account. I disagree. The story we're hearing is that Iraqis hate us, and crazy Shiite clerics are in charge. This says Iraqis don't hate us, and crazy Shiite clerics are having to threaten people to get any traction. That seems better than the conventional wisdom to me.
Virginia seems a bit miffed about Tim Blair's New York Times jokes, too. But if the Times had more writers like Virginia, people wouldn't be joking.
I'll take his point on the Iraq story, though that's not what he said in his post. (He said it was "distinctly positive," which implies less balanced view.) As for trying to justify the incessant Times bashing by suggesting that the Times should have more writers like me, that won't fly.
First of all, the Times is full of smart, conscientious, hard-working people who don't deserve to be bashed every day because sundry bloggers don't like their bosses. Second, this incessant sniping is coming from people who don't do reporting and rely every day on the reporting of the people they're trashing. Third, even the Times's annoying political bias is as much a function of its readers as it is of its editors, possibly more so. In my experience, the editors are far more open-minded and thoughtful than the readers who write them letters. Finally, the Times would be a disaster if it were full of writers like me, because I despise trying to get sources to tell me things they don't want me (or the public) to know, and I'm not especially good at it. I love learning new stuff, but I consider even easy reporting, like the stuff I do for D Magazine, to be a time-consuming pain--too much waiting by the phone, too many dead ends. That's why I got out of the newspaper business at an early age. The blogosphere is full of commentators, because commentary is easy and quick, and media commentary is the easiest and quickest of all.
In an email, Glenn referred me to his reply to Jeff Jarvis's sophisticated and freedom-loving post on big-media bashers. I'm with Jeff on this one, except I always use a plural verb with "media." It's not just a copy-editing tic. It's a point. The media are not one thing but many.