Hey, if the Florsheim fits:

Jon Meacham, editor of "Newsweek," compared journalists to MTV’s teen morons Beavis and Butt-Head for the demands they make on public officials, and portrayed himself as understanding of negative public sentiments of the media:

"One of the things people don’t like about journalists, reasonably, is that we’re kind of like Beavis and Butt-Head. You know, we demand people change, and then when they change, we kick ‘em in the shins and say ‘well, you didn’t change quick enough.'"

Meanwhile, Mark Tapscott looks at a much more serious and immediate problem in the MSM: how does AP begin to get its credibility back in light of Jamil Hussein?

You've probably not read much about it because only a handful of mainstream media outlets have covered it, but the Associated Press - for decades America's largest and most trusted wire news service - is at the center of a credibility crisis largely of its own making.

You probably have heard of the AP story that started it - a horrifying dispatch from Iraq the day after Thanksgiving claiming that six Sunnis had been doused with kerosene as they left their mosque following Friday prayers and burned alive by Shiite-aligned militiamen.

The story, which was quickly picked up by virtually every major news organization in the world, also claimed that "the Shiite-dominated police and Iraqi military" stood by doing nothing as the six people were gruesomely murdered. The story was sourced to "police Captain Jamil Hussein."

The problem is there appears to be no such person as Captain Jamil Hussein, at least not who is employed by the Iraqi police. The U.S. military says Hussein doesn't exist and has demanded that AP issue a correction. The Iraqi government says no such person is on its police payroll.

Things have gotten progressively worse for AP since those initial questions about "Hussein" were raised by U.S. and Iraqi officials. A firestorm of criticism has exploded in the Blogosphere as bloggers have researched the names of more than a dozen Iraqi- named sources of apparently doubtful credibility that have appeared in AP stories.

Tapscott echoes Glenn Reynolds' "habeas corpus" request in the latest Blog Week In Review podcast: AP needs to produce Hussein or risk even further damage to its reputation.

As Glenn mentioned, this story doesn't have the superstar figurehead quality that Ra^therGate had: Dan Rather is a household name; Jamil Hussein simply is not, and probably won't become one, no matter how hard the Blogosphere pushes. But all of these attacks on the media's credibility, including this latest one, have a drip, drip, drip quality to them, and added together, have seriously eroded public confidence in Big Media, as Jon Meacham's quote at the start of this post implies.