True Colors

Tom Maquire has a roundup of links on the NYTimes outing of the CIA's airlines. What on earth makes them think that anybody except terrorists and their sympathizers want this information or would want it made public. As Instapundit likes to say, they're not against the war, they're on the other side.

Tim Golden, the author of the story, compounded his stupidity by dismissing Glenn Reynolds:

I am reluctant to respond to people who call themselves by names like "Instapundit." I certainly support scrutiny of the press; the Times is a big, powerful institution and I think it should be accountable to the public. But a lot of our self-appointed critics don't make much of an effort to base their opinions on facts. Nor do they seem to understand much about the way that newspapers work.

Well, I'm reluctant to comment on a newspaper with a patently false motto like "All the news that's fit to print," but I will. Golden seems to think that, while his paper should be accountable, it should not be accountable to "self-appointed critics." How do you get any more factual than by linking to the story itself. Nobody has said the story is false. The criticism is that the story was published in the first place, also one which many people made about Newsweek's retracted story about Koran desecration.

I suppose you could argue that this was "fit to print," I wouldn't say so. Who needed to know this stuff and what makes it news? The standard seems to be "All the news that will make things more difficult for the Bush administration."

As for the "self-appointed critics" crack, think about it a little. Who appoints critics? Is there a registry of critics Golden can check to see if they're self-appointed or not? Basically, it boils down to the "no editors" argument against bloggers. But when people like Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, Hugh Hewitt and the guys at Power Line write, they don't need editors. (OK, sometimes Hugh could use a proofreader.) Do we really need editors to tell us whether we can have opinions or what they should be?