I’m taking a quick break from work to point you to William Arkin’s latest. As a non-veteran, I’ve been closer to amusement than anger over his (predictable) slip of the mask. But the latest actually kind of pisses me off. Here’s what he says:

The many e-mails I’ve gotten privately from people serving in the military are, not surprisingly, the most respectful and reflective. Some correspondents are downright indignant, some are sarcastic, and most are hurt by the “mercenary” epithet and my commentary. But they are philosophical about their service and where we are in the war and the country today.

The torrents of other mail — biting, fanatical, threatening — represent the worst of polarized and hate-filled America. I’m not complaining about being criticized or being made the latest punching bag for those who subsist off of high-volume conquest. Nor am I apologizing for addressing, however imperfectly, the questions I did last week, nor for being critical of the military.

Instead, I’m trying to make sense of the worldview of those who have responded. For the critics, I have become the enemy and have been demonized. In that process, I have ceased being a person, an individual, or a human being, all essential to justify the campaign to annihilate me. I’m not trying to offer myself up as victim here, nor do I expect the critics to change their view. I’m merely pointing out the process and the implications of the dehumanization.

OK, here’s what torques me off about this.

It’s not the dishonest ‘the private mail I get is overwhelming in support of me, as opposed to all the public comments which are hostile.’ It’s not the fact that he sets up not one, but four straw men as the arguments those opposed to his positions have made.

It’s simply this. Nowhere in the column – which he explains will, at the request of his editors, not talk about this any more – does he suggest that he may have anything to hear or learn from the people who wrote him.

It’s my old nemesis, The Journalist In The Hat, writ large:

A lot of this is about the mechanics and minutiae of journalism, I thought.

Then I went to Brian’s party, and met a journalist (sadly didn’t get his name or affiliation).

I’ll skip over his arrogance and rudeness; he was in a hostile environment, and maybe he was nervous. But watching the discussion, I realized something that brought the Times issue into clearer perspective for me.

In the discussion, I had substantive issues with his points, which were essentially that journalism is superior to blogging because it has an editorial process which drives it toward ‘fairness’ (he felt that objectivity was impossible and not necessarily even desirable), but a fairness informed by the moral sensibilities of the institution (I’m pulling a short argument out of a long and somewhat rambling discussion). Bloggers obviously don’t.

I tried to make the suggestion to him that individual blogs weren’t necessarily good at driving toward fairness, but that the complex of blogs – the dialog and interaction between blogs – was, and might in fact be better than mainstream media, isolated as they are from feedback. (Note that Perry from Samizdata got this point before I finished the sentence).

And what was interesting to me was this – that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other’s points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.

Or until we said ‘bullshit’ too many times and he walked away in a snit.