Salivating morons and lynch mob ethics

The Monday New York Times coverage of the role played by bloggers in the resignation of Eason Jordan from CNN has ignited yet another tempest between the journalistic mainstream and the bloggers. Good postings on the subject both from Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer. In brief, the bloggers see the article as another example of dishonest reporting on the challenge posed to Big Media. The feeling is that the press corps appears more interested in protecting its own than in ferreting out the truth. Mix in a dollop or two of red-state, blue-state fulminating and you've got high-octane potential for quite a donnybrook.

This latest affair began after bloggers seized upon comments attributed to Jordan that U.S. forces had deliberately aimed at journalists. Nobody yet has a full transcript of the remarks, which supposedly were made during the World Economic Forum late last month in Davos, Switzerland. But in today's piece on the aftermath of the resignation, the Times carried a doozy of a quote from Steve Lovelady, managing editor of CJR Daily, the Web site of The Columbia Journalism Review, lambasting the bloggers attacking the traditional media as a bunch of "salivating morons who make up the lynch mob."

Was that evidence of a malicious mindset at work? Or was it simply the killer quote every reporter lusts after? No matter. It's now part of the official lore in the struggle between Old Media and New Media.

Don't know about you but I'm sick of the shouting and posturing. By now it's all so predictable and so beside the point. What's clear is that the terrain has shifted and both sides -- the participatory media as well as the more established journalistic organs -- need to find their bearing in a new world order. It's not going to be easy to figure out how to mutually coexist. That's going to take some time -- maybe longer than I once believed.