As the *first comment* to their “blog post” states: “This deserves, though, a larger forum that the Nukes and Spooks blog site. It’s time for a front page editorial.”

Indeed: recognizing the good work that reporters do should be the responsibility of the editors & publishers, not the reporters themselves. (Minor point: “Front page” is probably less important as “search-engine optomized” these days.)

And none of that blog post *helps* the debate any. (It’s just horn-tooting.) If we really want media reform, we should demand transparency here. If NBC wants to defend itself by saying that it was the Pentagon that was making specific criticisms of coverage, well, they should have gotten in the practice of making an audit trail. (Such level of detail is what made the NYT’s expose of coached-military-analysts all the more effective.)

This is all the more frustrating that armchair critics keep echoing the meme “Even a Republican said that Big Media is Insufficiently Critical!” rather than looking at specific problems & remediations here.