bitter and resentful

Today's New York Times has an editorial, "Measuring the Blogosphere", that mostly reveals their own bitterness over the rise of independent voices. Writing anonymously, the editorial says:

The conventional media - this very newspaper, for instance - have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom isn't those discussions themselves, but the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs - or bloglike manifestations - of their own.

That is the serious side of the blogosphere.

Right. The serious side is the lame attempts by the MSM to do their own blogs. Blogs independent of the MSM are just attempts to say, "look at me! Look at me!":

But blogs are often just a way of making oneself appear on the Internet. It's like a closed-circuit video camera that catches a glimpse of you walking by an electronics store window filled with televisions. There you are in all your glory, suddenly, if not forever, mediated. Starting your own blog used to require a certain amount of technical expertise. Now you can do it from within popular Web portals like MSN and AOL, using tools that make it almost as easy as sending e-mail. These days, a surprising number of people write home by posting to their blogs - that is, by writing to everyone on earth.

The resentment goes so deep that the NYT can't even bear to mention the company that was one of the innovators in weblogs, Blogger. Why mention MSN and AOL when they are the latecomers and blogger.com is the real starter of the revolution? Simple, the MSM don't like innovation, period. To mention a startup instead of a powerhouse like AOL is just nonsense in the mind of the Times. Only the biggies are really important and the little guy must forever be dismissed.

Don't mistake my words for blogosphere triumphalism. I just find it fascinating to read the MSM and see how differently they see the world. To them, Instapundit, Powerline, Atrios and Daily Kos don't enter into the picture at all. To the Times there are two types of blogs. Serious ones, run by the MSM and "Hello, mom!" blogs and that's it. Does anyone really think that's the way it is?