Tom Friedman got his start when the mainstream media was cock of the walk. The Times was hard-hitting and cruel in its pursuit of the facts. Now, with the death of former Times editor and Friedman mentor Abe Rosenthal, Friedman sighs with nostalgia for the good ol’ days of journalism while simultaneously knocking those that think the Times has lost its way.

I like blogs, but the only bloggers who appeal to me are those who do reporting and aren’t just sitting at home in their pajamas firing off digital mortars.

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In this partisan age, many liberals want The Times to be the liberal Fox News. But we are not built to do that, not on our news pages, and Abe would be appalled at such a notion. This paper’s power, he knew, comes from the quality and fairness of its reporting. That is what builds the bond of trust with readers that is the source of any newspaper’s power.

Let’s work backwards here. People don’t necessarily want the Times to be a liberal Fox News, but they do want the paper to stop pushing the Republican memes and narratives. How many times has this blog alone caught the Times news pages regurgitating talking points from Republicans. What about the use of Rush Limbaugh as a source? Friedman pines for the days when his paper was about “the facts just the facts” and then argues that they’re not gone.

Now, to address his dismissal of the blogs. Ugh. What’s his criticism, anyway? That the blogs aren’t the Times? So he likes the investigative blogs–the professional ones, by and large–and “isn’t interested” in ones like Emboldened. That’s fine, we’re not trying to be a news source. We work for a living and use our spare time to engage ourselves in our world. Friedman allows columnists to “have a finger on the scale” of objectivity but doesn’t think blogs that opine are worthy of his time. Fine by me, but he’s missing the bigger picture.

The media has dropped the ball and the blogs are picking up the slack. The investigative blogs are made possible by the fact that there are millions of blog readers–many of whom are probably blog writers, too. Blogs are about investigation, sure, and their great at it, but they’re also about engagement, discussion, analysis, and education. They are not pages A29 thru A39,000,000 of the Times front section.

How Friedman misses this is beyond me. He’s the “flat world-er” who loves people powered politics, technology, and activism. I’m sure that Friedman knows that the blogs are the epitome of his global theory, but the fact that many of them are critical of his paper forces him to dismiss them.

At the end of his article, Friedman laments that “they don’t make ‘em like [Rosenthal] anymore.” Yeah, they make them like you, Tom. You may hate when journalists put their thumbs on the scale of objectivity but you seem to enjoy having your own rammed up your ass.