Back in January, I looked at the pincer movement the Washington Post has found itself stuck in lately. While the Post expects to be attacked from the right (because, to only slightly modify a recent Jonah Goldberg riff, "birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and conservative columnists gotta indulge their schadenfreude" about the sorry plight of the media. It's what we do), lately it's come under even more vociferous pressure from the left. That's something that Post columnist Richard Cohen recently discovered himself, much to his horror.

The L.A. Times, while far inferior in overall quality to the Post, is beginning to see similar bipartisan contempt emerge. Conservatives such as Hugh Hewitt, Patterico, Cathy Seipp, and umm, me, have long been pecking at it. But lately, Susan Estrich, best known as Michael Dukakis' campaign manager back in 1988, is none-too-thrilled with the Times' coverage of Anthony Pellicano, the wiretapping Hollywood detective. Estrich writes:

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, just a bookkeeping change, a drop in hotel distribution, as the publisher explains. Or maybe the market really works. In either case, to borrow from Abrams, some law professors I know have told me that the way the media has been hyping scandals lately has the potential to turn every newspaper into a suspected liar.

Or as I wrote back in January:

The contempt that the MSM now finds from both sides of the aisle is quite a unique development--and it will be fascinating to watch how it all plays out.

In any case, seventy years after its creation, how's that one-size fits all mass media concept playing out these days?

Update: Speaking of Pellicano, I haven't been following his escapades at all (despite Matt Drudge's frequent links, I don't really care), but over at TCS Daily, James Pinkerton calls them "The hottest movie coming out of Hollywood", and has a full round-up of Pellicano and his strange symbiotic relationshp with Tinseltown.