Revisionist Neo-Postmodern Media Criticism 2.0

Ragging on reporters is turning into a complicated racket.

Case in point: a story in today's edition of The New York Times about Howard Kurtz of the Times' archrival, The Washington Post.

Consider this: you are now reading an item in a media blog about a story in a newspaper about a reporter who writes about the media for another newspaper and talks about the media for another network.

If you care to comment in my entry, you will be commenting about an item in a media blog about a story in a newspaper about a reporter who writes about the media for another newspaper and talks about the media for another network.

If I respond to your post, I will be…. You get the picture.

It is easy and tempting to merely make fun of this kind of gazing at a navel-gazer's navel-gazing. But wait: I may have a point beyond comedy!

As self-involved as the Times' piece on Kurtz and this little piece right here may be, it all adds up, I am beginning to believe, to something like a free market, checking-and-balancing press police system that may -- may -- benefit the reporting business at a time when economic market forces are all scary.

This idea is akin to the war cry of the blog triumphalists: blogging fact-checkers and question-askers, though each alone may be flawed and narrow, together can form an army that will correct and hold accountable the press form more than editors and paid researchers ever could. Bloggers of the word Dissent!

I don't know if the blog triumphalists believe that the traditional press (TTP) needs to willingly participate in the revolution for it to succeed, but I do.

So even tough my instinct as an editor (as opposed to a gossip) is to cringe at the Times' Kurtz piece, I do think it is part of a process where some major news organizations are opening ourselves in untraditional ways that will result in better correction mechanisms, more fairness, tougher professional standards and eventually better stories and happier readers and viewers.

There are, of course, alternate views. Some see stories like the Kurtz profile as part of a maddening trend of reporters becoming celebrities, a trend that makes for bigger paychecks for the few and lousier content for the many. Others may see such stories as symptoms of a hunkering down, insular preoccupation typical of a dying industry. And insiders may see the story as a gilded hatchet job that got two writers from Slate and one from The Nation magazine to take potshots at a competitor.

I prefer to see the article as a text ripe for deconstruction by practioners of Revisionist Neo-Postmodern Media Criticism 2.0.