Virginia Postrel, herself a blogger and author, chides the online writers who have been piling on the New York Times knee-jerk style and addresses one of the essential differences between bloggers and reporters.

"The Times is full of smart, conscientious, hard-working people who don't deserve to be bashed every day because sundry bloggers don't like their bosses. Second, this incessant sniping is coming from people who don't do reporting and rely every day on the reporting of the people they're trashing. [snipped] The blogosphere is full of commentators, because commentary is easy and quick, and media commentary is the easiest and quickest of all." The whole thing is here.

Update: Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine.com) is another often-cited blogger who's had it with the less thoughtful and more political media bashing that passes for online wisdom. He thinks jealousy is part of it. "It's knee-jerk snarking for the sake of the snark, anti- for the sake of the anti-. And I've finally had my fill....[snipped to cut to the chase]...Our New York Times is a helluva lot more balanced than the Guardian or the Independent or the Sun or the Mirror. The truth is that the media we have is the media the market selected. We don't have five newspapers in every city anymore because the audience would not support them; they started watching TV instead."