Sippican Cottage says:

The New York Times et al., like to tell people that the internet is killing their business. Please. I can't be the only one that noticed that the front page is the editorial section now, and the editorial page has the quality and usefulness of unhinged rants. I'm not really in the market for either. And I'm too young to read the obituaries.

I certainly do get my information in glittering pixels every day. But as usual, they're either fooling themselves, or trying to fool you. I buried you, Mr. Newspaper, in a shallow grave, a decade before I saw that magnificent arial text on that tiny little 486 intel computer over a modem. And I'm not interested in whether they're fooling themselves, or trying to fool me, trying to blame the internet.

Meanwhile, Ace runs roughshod over the L.A. Times' latest anti-blog screed by Michael Skube. (Just add it to this pile and light the bonfire.) Ace adds that it "Seems an odd time for the MSM to lecture bloggers about the need for 'the patient fact-finding of reporters'":

No one -- no one -- ever got into the media to report on local car collisions or new and exciting federal farm subsidies.

What they got into the media to do was to tell people how and what to think, and its that prerogative of the Intellectual Aristocracy, and not the unglamorous business of information collection, collation, and dissemination, that they're crying about losing.

Note that they do not dare actually state their belief that they are specially qualified to do the thinking for the American public. They can't say such a thing. The public would laugh at their presumption -- some idiots went to a one year finishing school (and not a particularly academically demanding one besides) and now they have the special privilege of deciding what the public should think about each and every issue?

So instead they have to make the argument dishonestly -- whining about a job that isn't seriously threatened in order to preserve the job they really fret about losing, but a job which no one ever asked them -- let alone beatified them -- to do. How reporters got conflated with analysts and general-purpose experts without portfolio is anyone's guess. But that conflation having been made (at least in the minds of some, particularly their own), they'll be damned if they're going to give that gig up now.

Reporters seem to think they sell the news at 75 cents a copy -- and they tell us all how to interpret and analyze that news at no additional charge.

They think they're being generous by offering us their scary talents in this regard for free.

The above headline is a quote from Ace, but Jeff Goldstein, as usual, places it into added additional ironic context:

In his New Republic book review of Lucy Riall’s Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Alexander Stille writes:

Riall does not overemphasize the modernity of Garibaldi; she recognizes that he is not quite our contemporary. One of the interesting cultural differences that separates us from the culture of the Garibaldi cult is the almost willful use of wholly invented stories and details in the vast majority of Garibaldi biographies that circulated at the time. Even though there was plenty of dramatic and novelistic material from the real life of Garibaldi to draw on, writers seemed to go out of their way to fabricate stories and details. As Riall observes, conforming to the canons of contemporary romance and melodrama was much more important than any notion of journalistic accuracy and historical verisimilitude. “One of the most striking features of this script,” she writes, “was the apparently seamless blend of fact and fiction, of novelistic fantasy and political truth, and this blend…seems to have been at the heart of Garibaldi’s public success.”

[my emphasis]

Perhaps that separation of cultural conventions is no so complete as Mr Stille would pretend it to be. Or maybe it’s just that someone forgot to tell Franklin Foer.

For you lawyers out there, tell me: can one get a cease and desist order letter against a rather delightful example of situational irony…?

Speaking of which, Randall Hoven of the American Thinker (it was great to meet Thomas Lifson, his publisher, on Saturday at BFW, BTW, to discuss key TLAs) updates his list of media fabulists to include over 80 prominent members: "It's Not Just Scott Beauchamp (II)".