Cats and Dogs (Updated: Oh, if only a reporter had been there!)

Oh goody, a Blogwar! Well, a skirmish, anyway. Voicing his views with perhaps unintentional irony by using, of all outlets, a blog, "grizzled reporter" and "no ivy tower thumb-sucker," Jonathan Alter takes Radar's Jebediah Reed to task for his coverage of a conversation including Alter, Tom Edsall and former Sen. Mike Gravel. Salon's Glenn Greenwald then weighs in, skewering the underlying pomposity and arrogance of Alter's journalistic gripes with the blogosphere.

Greenwald gets the better, so far at least, insofar as the the argument is over the parasitic faults of the blogosphere versus the parasitic faults of news reporters. Damning a cat for being an unsatisfactory sort of dog is foolish, especially for someone like Alter who has gone from dogged reporter to feline columnist (and consultant to that hard-hitting news organization, MTV, no less!) over the years.

For that matter, whether Reed's reporting of the conversation was bad (as opposed to Reed merely being "a bad reporter") seems less a matter to Alter of getting the facts wrong than of not interpreting or understanding what was said in the way that Alter, himself, would have done. Yeah, well, welcome to the club, Jon. Wanna take a poll of the people you've reported on over the years who might make the same sort of complaint? Hey, maybe Reed just isn't grizzled enough yet.

One point, though, I'll give to Alter. If the now infamous lunch in question was really "off the record," Reed had no right to report it as he did. Maybe that's a fact in dispute, too. I couldn't say. But fair's fair. Even a mildly grizzled ivy tower thumb-sucker like me knows that.

UPDATE: But wait, there's more! Now Reed fires back, claiming Alter not only knew the lunch wasn't off the record, save for a moment, but that Reed had his tape recorder running and note-pad out the entire time! Well, it could still technically have been "off the record" as background only, but it sure sounds now like there's some pretty good evidence not only that it wasn't but that Alter clearly knew it wasn't. Hmmmmmm. I think Mr. Reed is calling you a liar, Mr. Alter. Care to respond?

Reed's priceless P.S. -- "Thanks for the cup of black bean soup! (Actually, please thank General Electric.)" Meow!