Hiding Behind Sprayed Ink

[Note the update at the bottom.]

I wasn't nearly hard enough on Michael Hiltzik (at least I can try and spell his name correctly - I guess I'm missing my four layers of editors).

I read Part Two of his - there's really no other word for it - venomous screed, and a few phrases just leapt out at me. Here are some highlights from both parts...

"conservative blogger who calls himself Patterico"

"a remarkable 11,000-word work of propaganda"

"Self-congratulation is a common characteristic of partisan blogs, like snouts on dogs."

"Among those who have made it their personal business to ferret out "liberal bias" at the Los Angeles Times—the existence of which bias I have in the past described as an "ignorant partisan trope""

"As any student of history knows, these are tools and techniques that were used to great effect during the Stalinist show trials of the ‘40s and ‘50s."

"Whether deliberately or by sheer indolence"

"reveling in ignorance of one’s subject"

"a chorus of mendacious commentary and rhetorical cant."

"Uncritical readers, wishing to have their ignorant preconceptions reinforced without straining a brain cell, are no doubt gobbling it up."

"how easily they can be punctured"

"it takes more time and effort to deflate a lie than to propound it in the first place"

"proved upon inspection to be similarly gaseous"

"to make his case stick he requires an uncritical, credulous audience that will repeat his claims endlessly without bothering to examine them"

"then there's a juvenile tone to much of Frey's posting"

"who combines a conservative viewpoint with an incoherent style of argument"

Go read both of the parts yourself. Take a few moments, this'll still be here.

For now, I'm going to skip over the substantive arguments he presents - which I'll suggest are as full of holes as Emmenthaler - as an exercise best left to Patrick, others, or myself if I'm bored this weekend.

But I want to go back to Hiltzik and the Journalist In The Hat in my original post. What's flatly missing from Hiltzik's piece?

Hmmm. Respect for his opponent, for the dialog, for the essentially political (as in the praxis-laden) relationship between you and someone you're arguing with. Instead, Hiltzik means to drive Patterico from public dialog, to shame him into silence.

That's contemptible. Ironically, Hiltzik made the same accusation toward me, in the first email he sent me after I criticized him and compared him unfavorably to Dan Walters:

"I just had the pleasure of reading your post on Winds of Change.net, which indicates you want to take away my job for speaking the truth. Nice."

I didn't really want to take his job away then, but I'd say that I do now.

Here's why.

I'm a member of a mailing list for Global Voices, out of the Berkman Center at Harvard, which attempts to encourage local folks to blog both as a way of communicating within their own communities and to bring the events in their communities to wider attention.

Recently, there was a mild discussion on the list (it's a list that encourages polite yet passionate interaction) about what the media choses to cover - 12 miners dead in West Virginia, or 200 dead in a mudslide in Java?

This showed up in my inbox (posted with the permission of the author):

From: Kevin Anderson-Washington XXXXXXXXX@bbc.co.uk Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 16:30:18 -0000
To: XXXXXXXXX@eon.law.harvard.edu
Subject: RE: Best of Both Worlds Continued

OK,

I've been meaning to contribute to this discussion because I come from the mainstream media world - the other world so to speak. And the editor of the programme I work on at the BBC World Service, Mark Sandell, has been following this discussion.

Our programme has asked several of you to join us to talk about what is going in your part of the world, and we use Global Voices as a way to broaden out our agenda. What stories are you talking about that we should be aware of?

I still am considering my thoughts about the ways in which blogs and traditional media complement each other. I definitely am not of the view of an adversarial relationship between bloggers and traditional media although being from the US, I have definitely seen this in action.

But, I just wanted to flag up a little note from our editor Mark Sandell, about our thinking in covering stories. We had a discussion yesterday about the mining tragedy in the US, although we expanded this to deal with mine safety elsewhere, including China and South Africa. We had a lot of e-mail comments about why we weren't covering the landslides in Java or returning to cover the plight of quake victims in South Asia.

Mark posted his thoughts here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/world_have_your_say/4584506.stm

Right now, it's at the top of the page, but it will shift to the middle after our day-end update. Look for the Note from the Editor. Let me know what you think. We're trying to be more open about why we do what we do.

best,
k

Kevin Anderson
BBC World Service and Five Live

Notice a difference in tone?

I've slagged the Beeb on this blog in the past few years, but count me a fan if this is the direction they are moving in - of engaging their audience, offering up discussion of the hard choices they make in covering stories, and accepting transparency (and, inevitably, accountability - you can't be visible and not be accountable).

Let's go back to the Journalist In The Hat. What I said then was:

Then I went to Brian's party, and met a journalist (sadly didn't get his name or affiliation).

I'll skip over his arrogance and rudeness; he was in a hostile environment, and maybe he was nervous. But watching the discussion, I realized something that brought the Times issue into clearer perspective for me.

...that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other's points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.

Because that's his job...to talk. And ours is, of course to listen. Let's listen to Kathleen Parker, whose bio says:

Kathleen Parker has contributed to more than a dozen newspapers and magazines during her 20 years as a journalist. She began her twice-weekly commentary column in 1987 as a staff writer for The Orlando Sentinel. After entering into syndication in 1995, her column rocketed in popularity and now appears in more than 300 papers nationwide.

Here's what 20-year journalist Kathleen says:

Schadenfreude - pleasure in others' misfortunes - has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog. When someone trips, whether Dan Rather or Eason Jordan or Judith Miller, bloggers are the bloodthirsty masses slavering for a public flogging. Incivility is their weapon and humanity their victim.

I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people out there - professors, lawyers, doctors, philosophers, scientists and other journalists who also happen to blog. Again, they know who they are. But we should beware and resist the rest of the ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction.

We can't silence them, but for civilization's sake - and the integrity of information by which we all live or die - we can and should ignore them.

"ego-gratifying rabble"?? Where do I get my membership card?

The point of both Hiltzik's plaintive whine and Parker's outburst is simple - we're trained professionals, dammit! Where's your respect? And pull up your pants! (apology to Dennis Leary)

Frey can't possibly be a useful of effective critic of the Times because - wait for it - he doesn't have the depth of experience in doing daily journalism with the pressure! and stress! and hard choices that entails.

When bloggers criticized CBS News for trying to tank an election with fraudulent documents, the goal wasn't to set the record straight, it was to embarrass the practitioners in the media.

When I criticize my betters in the media, I'm marking myself as "rabble," and fit best to be ignored by people of substance.

What a pile of crap. Get over yourselves.

Co-blogger Trent once suggested that I was out of my depth in criticizing Bush's strategic planning for the War on Terror - "The net assessment of national security requirements and its translation into grand strategy is a highly specialized field of academic study who best practitioners are currently working on or are consultants for the National Security Council and the Department of Defense," Trent said. My reply was simple:

...the genius of the American system is that there certainly are experts on game theory, diplomatic history, and policy who have substantive and valuable expertise in these areas.

And they all work for guys like me. Our Congress and our President are typically business men and women, lawyers, rank amateurs when it comes to the hard games that they study so diligently at ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration). And that's a good thing, in fact, it's a damn good thing.

Michael Hiltzik and Kathleen Parker work for me, and for folks like me. It's our eyeballs that sell the ads, and the advertiser money and our twenty-two fifty a month (or whatever it is) that puts food on their table.

I don't ask for obsequiousness. But - like the waiter at the trendy WeHo restaurant who finally gave me too much attitude, at which point I asked him to come over and quietly told him:

"I'm paying to eat here and you're being paid to work here. I'm not going to ask you to kiss my ass, but I'm going to tell you to start treating me like a human being" - Hilzik and company need a swift, enlightening, Zen-master slap to the head to get them to open their eyes.

In a way, I'm sorry for them. For hundreds of years, the guild they are members of had the only megaphone in town. Now, they're one of many, and they will stand or fall not on whether they've made it into the club or not, but on what they do, and - most important - on how they manage to make the change from monologuing to having dialog with other human beings.

Kevin Anderson gets it. Michael Hiltzik doesn't. Unless he starts to, I'd say the Kevin Andersons will wind up working for the Times instead. And we'll all be better off.

[Edited title.]
[Update: In comments, Patterico is concerned that I want to see Hiltzik fired. No, certainly not because of his rudeness or this interaction. I'll suggest that there are better business columnists out there, but the core of my point is that people with attitudes like Hiltzik's to their audience are a) not the future of media; and b) damaging to the parent brand.

I'd love to see Hiltzik step out of his bubble (denoted in part by his blogroll) and join the rest of us rabble in a conversation about the issues important to him.

I'd also love to have an intimate dinner with Uma Thurman, which may be slightly more probable (TG says is she shows up at the door, I get to go, in case you're concerned).]