In Mark Steyn's remembrance of Pope John Paul II, republished in his recent anthology of obits, he notes that when John Paul passed away in early April of 2005, the New York Times accidentally uploaded the first draft of its own obituary to its Website, which began like this:

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II's admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

Fortunately, the guys at Power Line captured a screen grab before the Times updated their article. Steyn would later dub the Times' flub a "hilarious self-parody of the progressivist cocoon", adding:

The pontiff's many "detractors" were all lined up and ready to go, but despite over a billion Catholics in the world and millions of evangelical Protestants throughout America who also admire him, the paper somehow failed to notice until the last minute that they'd overlooked something--"NEED SOME QUOTE FROM SUPPORTER".

PBS, another representative of the progressivist cocoon, also "Need Some Quote From Supporter", but somehow, couldn't seem to find one this week, Tim Graham of Newsbusters writes:

Several national newspapers praised the four-hour PBS Frontline series beginning Tuesday night titled "News War," on how Team Bush (and Team Nixon before that) undemocratically waged war on the press. There's not much on whether the press was undemocratically waging war on the elected president in those cases. (Who, pray tell, voted for the New York Times to run the country?) The man setting the table for the first two hours is Arun Rath, who the South Asian Journalists Association website jokingly notes "acquired a semi-classical education at Reed College in Oregon ('Atheism, Communism and Free Love')." What a surprise for an NPR/PBS producer.

In a new interview on the SAJA website, Rath explained how he was somehow completely incapable of tracking down conservatives to comment on the show's arrogant liberal thesis, namely that the press is crucial to save democracy from freedom-crushing Republicans:

We tried without success for nearly a year to get someone from the administration to talk to us, but at the last minute we scored an interview with Dan Bartlett. That, and a number of other key interviews came about from simple persistence and effort over a long time by a number of producers.

We were originally going to feature a lot more about the rise of conservative media in this series, but it just wouldn’t fit in the end; plus we’d tried without success to get interviews with the big names at Fox News, and to talk about conservative media without such key players (Rush Limbaugh et al also turned us down) felt a little weak.

Suffice it to say PBS has not contacted the news watchers at the MRC. It's probably also easily guessed they didn't call the many conservative talk show hosts and members of Congress who could build up a decent head of steam about the arrogance of Obama-worshipping newspapers who wage war on the war on terror.

Amongst the "et al" that Rath tosses aside after El Rushbo's name, Hugh Hewitt writes that he was contacted for an interview request:

Producer Raney Anderson journeyed to California to make the case for why I ought to participate, and I declined. I spent a decade inside the PBS system, and while I think Ms. Anderson is a talented and sincere documentarian, the form is inherently biased as the moment a cut gets made, an editorial choice has been rendered, and I didn't trust a PBS team, however talented, to make those choices about what I have to say about media, new and old.

I was open to being persuaded, though, and made a sincere offer to Ms. Anderson: She could come on my radio show, discuss the series with me, her objectives and her methods, and then I would run a web-based poll asking my listeners if I should participate. I would agree to abide by their vote.

This bit of applied transparency intrigued Ms. Anderson, but was ultimately declined. The negotiations were interesting and good humored. I did provide many other suggestions. We parted on good terms. A few months later, Ms. Anderson --a very persistent producer-- tried again, and even dangled the prospect of having the series' host, Lowell Bergman, appear on my program. I declined. With most docs, it is the producer and director who matter most, and I had offered to allow the team to film the entire radio show on which they appeared.

Hugh adds:

I have to say that old media's insistence that new media play by its rules is outdated. It is too bad that PBS is still mired in the old ways, producing all the usual shows from all the usual suspects.

And still spinning every step of the way.

Given the long history of PBS (and commercial networks such as CBS where Bergman cut his teeth; Al Pacino portrayed him during his 60 Minutes days in the 1999 movie, The Insider) of pulling the football away at the last second, have conservatives finally figured out that it's not worth their time appearing on shows such as this? But couldn't PBS have found someone from National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Power Line guys, or someone else from the Blogosphere to appear? Or is the balkanization of the media finally complete?

And by not finding anyone on the right to appear, as producer Arun Rath notes above, aren't they making the point that President Bush made during his first term regarding how unrepresentative of a diverse national audience the legacy media has become?

The PBS show and its fallout with Hugh illustrate the difference in how the right and left define "the press". In these days of Weblogs, cheap digital audio recorders and minicams, conservatives believe that "the press" refers to mediums now open to anyone (witness how many one-man bloggers such as Michael Yon are, or recently have been in Iraq). PBS, despite, or perhaps because of their government funding, seems to be mired in the 1972-era definition that "the press" equals journalists cocooned in large New York and DC office buildings--old institutions turned sclerotic and moving increasingly further leftward--the Times, the Washington Post--and PBS itself. As James Q. Wilson wrote late last year:

Focusing ever more sharply on the mostly bicoastal, mostly liberal elites, and with their more conservative audience lost to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, mainstream outlets like the New York Times have become more nakedly partisan.

So why should the Bush administration play ball with them, any more than a Hillary Clinton or Obama administration be expected to give much time to Fox News or National Review?