Scooped?

An unsigned editorial in today's Watauga Democrat entitled "Rumor has it..." gets all self-righteous about this blog's articles and the comments of some readers. Self-righteous and more than a little defensive, which is a clumsy combination.

The editorialist apparently had gotten around to reading Glenn Hubbard's April 13th guest contribution to this site (here) in which Hubbard faulted the local media for ignoring the biggest news story of the year.

The editorialist is miffed: "Media outlets -- at least legitimate ones -- do not report the mere possibility of a story."

Two paragraphs later: "We don't report rumors." That's funny -- in both the "ha-ha" and the "odd" senses -- because the denunciation of "rumors" comes after five self-defensive paragraphs full of exactly that ... rumors. To wit:

1. "A locally-operated Web site," which we will not name, has

2. Reported "unsubstantiated gossip," which we will not repeat, about

3. A local elected official whose identity we cannot divulge.

Our suggested alternative title for this editorial: "A nervous titter ran through the room."

My favorite part of the editorial is the solemn invoking of Bob Woodward (twice) as the self-justification for not reporting the news. The editorialist appears to be attributing to Bob Woodward the opinion that blogs are "this pollution" that "needs to be eradicated by people in our business." Whoa, dude! "Eradicated"?

We'd be the first to admit that editorial writers for the Watauga Democrat are extraordinarily similar to Bob Woodward, so similar in fact we likely couldn't tell one from the other in a police line-up. And we can understand the Watauga Democrat holding up the True Cross of Sainted American Journalism as a talisman against the likes of us.

Lord knows, we've wrapped ourselves in the mantles of our own heroes. The tricky part of dressing up in borrowed clothes is not to get your feet all tangled up in the hem, which our editorialist manages to do. He doesn't want to be associated with EVERYTHING Bob Woodward has done: "we recognize that Woodward himself has sometimes been guilty of slipshod, second-handed reporting, but he's on the money in this case."

Memory fails me. Didn't Woodward bring down a president and keep his source secret for, oh, 30 years? After that, Woodward turned into the court stenographer, taking dictation from powerful men who wanted to shape their own images.

It's not enough that the "pure journalism" of the Watauga Democrat has marked blogs and blogging for eradication. There seems to be a creeping realization in the editorialist that something may have been overlooked here, so he delivers a stern warning in a different direction at the end: "And to those public officials who think they can hide in those [gossipy] waters [where the Watauga Democrat refuses to swim], be forewarned...." We ARE watching you. We're watching you because we read something we can't talk about on a source we disdain.