| |
| | mediabistro.com: Articles: Dilemmas in Media Reporting: Is Navel Gazing Good for You? |
 | | They are, of course, tonally different from the straight reportage, and consciously make an effort to cover media personalities in a satirical vein, as if they were conventional celebrities—partly in the hopes that doing so will emphasize the ridiculousness of doing so sincerely. |
 | | The downsides of media reporting—the incestuous nature of it, the endless navel-gazing, the near impossibility of avoiding self-referentiality—are small prices to pay for the merits of doing something that can, when executed properly, make an enormous difference in the maintenance of a free press. |
 | | Media reporting, when done well, is an important tool in the industry's ability to police itself, and in this day and age, everyone with a blog or the ability to write a letter to the editor is a potential media critic and reporter. |
| www.mediabistro.com /articles/cache/a4457.asp (1485 words) |
|