I dwelled on the Mark Yost MSM Beatdown, otherwise known as the Black Ink Wall of Silence, as I waited in lines aplenty earlier today at the demobilization site. The vitriolic journalistic reaction to Yost’s column, including for calls for Yost to be disciplined or fired for suggesting flaws in Iraq coverage, is not just annoying — it is a case study in mainstream media arrogance.

The current president took quite a bit of heat from the press after Sept. 11 when he said to the world’s nations that “you’re either with us or against us” in the war on terror. It’s nice to see that the press came around and embraced the philosophy, despite applying it to our own credibility-strained business.

How can an industry with a credibility problem on the level of the MSM ever reform itself if criticism is welcomed with “shut up”? The only thing that can snap the press to its senses is what studies show is already ongoing — an exodus from television and print journalism for alternate sources of information. Local newspapers continue to hold their own — they tend to be more in-tune with their readers than the big-city ideological broadsheets — but the biggies continue to slide.

As if you needed any more proof that Steve Lovelady, and by default his Columbia Journalism Review, is an Inquisitor demanding orthodoxy rather than a fair-minded media critic, a Rathergate regular decided to e-mail him and see what happened. Lovelady’s response is something to behold (read more):

My post prompted a reader named Michael, a paralegal in Alexandria, Va., to e-mail Lovelady. He sent his e-mail and the response he received, and it’s just too good not to share.

So anyone who criticizes the one-sided coverage of the Iraq war should be fired? Stepping on fellow journalists’ toes is enough to get you hushed?

You actually have the nerve to publish this lunacy on the internet?

You guys are something else!..

To which Lovelady responded:

Well, I certainly can’t get him fired … though I suspect the accumulated animosity of his award-winning colleagues on the Knight Ridder payroll in Washington and Baghdad might do the trick.

Step back and think about this for a moment, Michael. Consider a comparable hypothetical.

There you are in Alexandria, a paralegal whose work has won acclaim from far and wide in the world of bankruptcy law. One day you pick up the paper and, lo and behold, there are your colleagues at [work address withheld] (who couldn’t hold your hat, much less match your job performance) savagely attacking your work IN THE NEWSPAPER !

Would you consider that dirty pool, and cowardly to boot ? I would.

Apparently so did Clark Hoyt and Hannah Allam, the real reporters Yost was deriding. Each eloquently eviscerated the hapless Yost on Romenesko. Couldn’t have happened to a nice guy.

Yost is a fraud, an armchair general of the worst sort, and if my call to arms played some small part in exposing him, then I call that a good day at the office.

Lovelady could have saved himself three minutes and a contribution to carpal tunnel syndrome by replying, “Dear Michael: Yes. Step on toes and you must be hushed. Love, Steve.”

I am flabbergasted that any journalist, not just a managing edior at CJR, could have made the comparison that Lovelady did. In short, Lovelady argues that this is a matter of corporate loyalty. I wonder how he feels about loyalty when it comes to Deep Throat and Richard Nixon?

First of all, journalism is not the paralegal business. Journalism is not brain surgery. It’s a completely different trade. True, I revealed here before that anybody can be a journalist, but it plays by a different set of rules. It’s supposed to be challenged and critiqued by fellow journalists, a fact most of them forgot a long time ago. Journalists pride themselves on taking absolutely nothing on faith and “if your mother says she loves you, check it out,” but they are notoriously thin-skinned when the public or their bretheren have the temerity to apply the standard to them.

Secondly, Lovelady is being intellectually dishonest — I know that comes as a shock to you all, but bear with me. Yost does not identify his newspaper or any journalists by name as being the ones dropping the ball. The column is a broad-brush indictment of the media, not a cheap shot at his co-workers. Therefore, his asking how Michael would feel does not remotely apply to the Yost situation.

The true fraud here is Lovelady. I can’t repeat enough the delicious irony that the man who threw a grande mal seizure when bloggers got Eason Jordan at CNN canned, calling them “salivating morons who make up the lynch mob,” considers his “call to arms” to “expose” Yost a “good day at the office.”

What a hypocrite. And these CJR buffoons think that Victor Navasky is going to give their excuse for a media monitor new life?

On another note, who is Lovelady to talk about somebody “…savagely attacking your work IN YOUR OWN NEWSPAPER”? If I ever have a slow news day I’ll expound on Journalism’s Fourth Dirtiest Little Secret: Newshounds can be some of the backstabbingest people on the planet. Trust me, when someone stops you in the hallway and says, “Hey Bob, great story,” the odds are statistically significant that they’re thinking, “You’re overrated and it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you dropped dead from a brain aneurysm.”

Reading letters from the pack of journalist vultures at Romenesko circling around Yost, it appears as if some of them — a true bunch of salivating morons making up a lynch mob — are taking Lovelady’s marching orders to heart.

This brings us back full circle to the question I originally asked: can the MSM reform itself when a clunky but well-intentioned and genuine column questioning the lack of positive Iraq coverage invites such venom? Lovelady and Co. are practicing the very “heckler’s veto” they decry when bloggers gang up on a questionable media story.

The answer is no. They cannot. It appears that a few, like Yost, have the mental wiring necessary for self-evaluation and self-correction, but we unfortunately appear to be in a minority party.

I’ve reserved my seat for next year’s media show of wallowing in self-pity and self-flagellation when the circulation and viewership numbers show yet another drop. No doubt that anyone offering the real cure — admission of biases and adding conservative voices to newsrooms — will be shouted down by the same crowd.

UPDATE: NRA News with Cam Edwards was supposed to interview Yost today at 5:25 p.m. ET, but they just said that Yost canceled (a live feed can be heard here). That doesn’t bode well for Yost. If Yost’s bosses are leaning on an opinion editor for writing opinions, doesn’t that defy the purpose of hiring one in the first place?

UPDATE 2: Chris Muir at Day by Day looks like he’s going to spend the next few days giving Yost’s critics a taste of their own medicine.

UPDATE 3: Stephen Spruiell at National Review’s media blog has been dominating this issue. Check out the links here, here and here.

UPDATE 4: Michelle Malkin has some useful links to blogs following the Yost saga.