There Is No Arrogance In The MSM

To paraphrase Monty Python, Will Collier of VodkaPundit writes that there’s no arrogance in the mainstream media. And when he says none, he does mean that there is a certain amount.

Well, an enormous amount, actually:

We see you beind the curtain, Lovelady and company, and we’re not impressed by either your bluster or your insults. You aren’t higher beings, and everybody out here has the right–and ability–to fact-check your asses, and call you on it when you screw up and/or say something stupid. You, and Eason Jordan, and Dan Rather, and anybody else in print or on television don’t get free passes because you call yourself “journalists.”

You obviously don’t like that reality, but it is reality, and you’d better start learning to live with it instead of tossing ad hominen insults at your critics.

We’re not going away. Deal with it.

Or as Hugh Hewitt told me last month:

The long tail can also create what Hewitt calls “blog swarms”, a spiraling vortex where one blogger picks up a story, then 10 or so of his fellow bloggers pick it up, and so on, as it continues to spiral outward. When this happens, the power of the tail becomes clear — and it’s caused major damage to the careers of Senators Trent Lott and John Kerry, anchorman Dan Rather, and to the reputations of the New York Times and CBS.

Despite this, Hewitt says, the tail of the Blogosphere is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. “They’ve never worried about the tail, ever”, he chortles. “And now they’ve got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7.”

As much as I’d like to simply cap this post with something smug like, “Yesterday was not the last bite”, I’d much rather see a mainstream media start to simply report the news fair and balanced (hey, I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before…), and not do and say the kinds of things that have lead to Blogosphere running roughshod over Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Ra^ther, Eason, et al.

But the MSM isn’t likely to change its spots anytime soon, are they?

Update: The comments section in Will’s VodkaPundit post is a must-read. Just keep scrolling.

And speaking of arrogance, Jordan’s firing has launched the first of the inevitable McCarthyism charges as a backlash by big media. Assuming that CNN has viewed the tape of Jordan’s comments and found it damning, those charges are a sort of offshoot of James Lileks’ 21st century update to the definition of McCarthyism.