You're going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I'm up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn't left the efficiency apartment in two years" -- Brian Williams, anchor of the "NBC Nightly News," speaking before New York University journalism students on the challenges traditional journalism faces from online media.

This is from a WSJ article, according to Hugh Hewitt.

This explains why they hate us, in particular why the pundits hate us.

They hate us because they've arrived at the pinnacle of their profession, a position achieved after years of hard work and corporate maneuvering, even formal education. And then Glenn Greenwald and Josh Marshall show up. Glenn and Josh don't merely beat them at their game by doing original journalism. They also expose the pinnacles that they have reached as hollow. It turns out that the very apex of the journalistic world--political commentary out of Washington DC--consists of high school politics over your best friends' friends, and a series of incestuous, sometimes literally sexual, relationships. This leads to extremely narrow reporting and opinion-making that, in practice, is closely aligned with partisan Republican narrative. We've seen this over and over again.

They have no choice but to smear us, because they cannot win an argument on the merits, as Glenn has been demonstrating wrt ABC's inflammatory anthrax reporting and Josh has with his US Attorney work and Firedoglake has done with the Libby trial.

So they willfully mischaracterize a constitutional lawyer, a working journalist, a former prosecutor and so forth as "some guy in the Bronx." Is it really possible that Brian Williams is unaware of the FDL Libby coverage or the work Josh has been doing? We know for sure that there was interest in the FDL work by people with .mil, .doj, .wh, and .cia in their ip address name.

This is a willful, intentional and dishonest attempt to devalue work that is becoming a product of significantly higher quality than that put out by Brian Williams network. And it won't work. All that will work is for them to start doing a better, more transparent and accurate reporting.