Molly Ivins wrote a column discussing the downward slide of newspapers and comments on the sale of Knight-Ridder to McClatchy. She quotes Tom Rosenstiel of Project for Excellence who said: "It's probably glib and even naive to say simply that more platforms equal more choices. The content has to come from somewhere, and as older news-gathering media decline, some of the strengths they offer in monitoring the powerful and verifying the facts may be weakening, as well." (Emphasis mine-HH)

This obviously stroked Mollie's ego and with a great deal of pretentiousness she writes:

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, run by Columbia University, has a new report out that finds the number of media outlets continues to grow, but both the number of stories covered and the depth of reporting are sliding backward. Television, radio and newspapers are all cutting staff, while the bloggers of the Internet either do not have the size or the interest to go out and gather news. Bloggers are not news-gatherers, but opinion-mongers. I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter -- nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened. Or, as author-journalist Curtis Wilkie puts it, "Unless you can cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you shouldn't be allowed to cover a presidential campaign."

Another example of elitism and a desire to stifle free speech. It's hard for me at times to determine who has a more vanity or exaggerated self-worth: lawyers, politicians, "Hollywood", or those in the media.