NICK LEMANN PROVES MY POINT: Writing in The New Yorker, he observes:

“Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff—and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession,” Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths.”

The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn’t use to be.

I appreciate the book plug. But, actually, it’s Lemann who’s doing the conflating, taking my comments about punditry and then applying them to hard-news reporting. Lots of other people responded to Lemann while I was away — Rebecca MacKinnon has a response and a big roundup here — so I’ll just note one recent event that suggests that the standards set by alleged professionals aren’t very high.

That, of course, is Reuters’ use of faked photos from Lebanon, part of a larger trend on the part of allegedly professional and objective Western media to use local stringers who are thoroughly anti-Israel and anti-American and then present the resulting reporting as if it were neutral and factual. And it’s not as if the most recent developments are unusual.

I agree with this take: “Quite apart from the dismaying ineptitude of missing the clear evidence of manipulation that bloggers will eagerly and easily throw in their faces, we should worry that there is much more subtle and expert use of photoshopping going on all the time.”

Despite claims to the contrary, I haven’t argued that blogs will replace traditional journalism. But this stuff makes “amateur hour” look pretty good. And if a blogger had perpetrated this kind of a fraud and had it reproduced all over the world, I suspect we’d be hearing much more in the way of tut-tutting from the likes of Lemann.