This little kerfuffle explains everything that's wrong with the practice of "professional" journalism. Here's Michael Skube, making a point about blogs:

Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post -- are insistent partisans in political debate. Some reject the label "journalist," associating it with what they contemptuously call MSM (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of "citizen journalist" dedicated to broader democratization.

So I'm reading TPM today, and I run across this:

So against my better judgment, I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere.

The amazing thing is the eventual answer from Skube, after a few exchanges between the two:

Not long after I wrote I got a reply: "I didn't put your name into the piece and haven't spent any time on your site. So to that extent I'm happy to give you benefit of the doubt ..."

...

"I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples ... "

I guess that's one of those examples of "layers of editors" helping to make the reporting accurate, huh? Never mind the field: science, politics, health, whatever - this is what passes for professionalism, and it's why I don't trust most reporting. At least with bloggers, the allegiances are right there on their sleeves, where we can see them.

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