In the middle of defending Michael Hiltzik’s cover version of The Who’s Quadrophenia (“Is it me, for a moment?”), fellow L.A. Timesman Tim Ruttten writes of Hiltzik’s critics:
They don’t want an unbiased news media, they want a press that reflects their bias.
What unbiased news media is that? Tim apparently never got the memo in 2004.
Update: Writing in the Philadelphy Inquirer, Hugh Hewitt, who was mentioned, along with other conservative commentators by Rutten in the above linked piece, (and has had at least one on-air run-in with Hiltzik) notes:
Each morning, we awake to new mountains of information. Bloggers are the new Sherpas, leading their readers through those various ranges. Newspaper reporters and editors are the old Sherpas. Lots of folks – especially liberals and elites – still like the old Sherpas. The mainstream media – MSM – are populated overwhelmingly by left- and hard-left-leaning writers and editors, and few people even bother to argue the point anymore. American newspapers are not unlike American car companies: Market dominance made them lazy and uninterested in their customer base, and a lot of that base slowly melted away, even before the new media arrived. When blogs and talk radio and cable arrived and offered a choice to news consumers long disgusted with biased product, remaining center-right readers began to bolt.
Shouldn’t journalists like Hiltzik and Rutten look for the root cause of their readers’ frustration and ponder seriously, “why do they hate us?”, before lashing out?
After all, one man’s blogger is merely another man’s freedom of information fighter.
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