It’s hardly surprising when someone fires back at a harsh critic of his or her employer’s competence and/or ethics. But when that someone is superstar New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and the return fire takes the form, in part, of “Fuck you,” it raises a few eyebrows — and makes you wonder about a broader hubris.

The exchange in question came yesterday at the Freedom to Connect conference, a gathering in suburban Washington where people discuss issues related to data networking and the information revolution. Friedman’s keynote talk was all about his latest book and touched on the conference theme only briefly during the Q&A.

He’d already dropped the F-bomb at the start of his talk (in a WTF mode) when he noticed the conference back-channel discussion scrolling by on a stage-monitor screen. Later, during the Q&A, he was asked to comment on a question posted there that challenged the Times’ credibility in a fairly general and nasty way.

He began, appropriately, by saying that yes, the paper makes mistakes. But then he offered what sounded like a more heart-felt response, the above-noted “fuck you,” winning applause from some but certainly not all or (by my estimate) even a majority of the audience.

Friedman had my sympathy in some ways. It’s hard to sit there and take abuse, even though pundits dish it out for a living to people who have thicker skins than all but a tiny minority of journalists. (I’ve fired back at some folks on my various blogs over the years, even ones written as part of newspaper gigs, but always remembered that there were lines I wouldn’t cross in that professional venue or, short of the most extreme provocation, in any situation.)

Yes, the question he’d been asked was shallow and accusatory — and yet absolutely reasonable in several key respects. The Times (I own stock in the company) is a great institution that does absolutely vital work. But it has had to answer, and not always persuasively, for its own grotesque lapses — not least, in recent history, the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals — and Friedman himself has hardly been a pundit whose pronouncements are infallible or, on some issues, even mostly correct in retrospect. His self-involvement isn’t off the charts, meanwhile, but it’s plainly strong.

So while understandable, his arrogant retort reflected more than merely the self-assurance of a pundit who’s won multiple Pulitzer prizes, has penned best-selling books and gives speeches around the globe promoting his viewpoints. It was entirely illustrative of his newspaper’s famous confidence, which more often than it should bleeds into hubris and outright arrogance.

Saying “Fuck you” didn’t make him more authoritative. It diminished him.

UPDATE: Friedman sent the following (very slightly edited) to a Freedom-to-Connect mail list, and gave me permission to repost it here:

To those who understood where I was coming from, thanks. To those who didn’t, thanks also. We should all learn from our critics.

I believe passionately in the New York Times, a place I have worked at my whole adult life. Lord knows, it has made its mistakes. Which newspaper or blogger hasn’t? But I believe that when it is at its best it plays a vitally important role in our democracy, and flippant, denigrating remarks about it, at a time when it is in economic peril and our country desperately needs serious journalism to sort through this crisis, struck me as deeply unserious.

That said, when I’m trying to make a point, especially a heartfelt one, and my choice of words ends up getting in the way of that point — even if for just one person — then I chose the wrong words. So thanks to all for a great discussion and a learning afternoon.

The Quiet Coup,” is this chart:

What’s not noted here — or in most traditional media coverage of the meltdown — is something that everyone should understand. These profits were an illusion in the end. They existed just long enough, purely on paper but not in any long-term reality, to boost stock prices in these companies and to give executives the excuse to pay themselves extravagant salaries and bonuses and, if they were really smart, to unload their stock at high prices.

Capitol Alert: Eleven papers run A-1 editorial blasting lawmakers, Schwarzenegger.In a rare move, at least 11 California newspapers ran a front-page editorial on Sunday blasting the Legislature and governor for failing to solve the state’s budget woes. “The once great state of California today becomes a national disgrace,” the editorial began. The editorial ran in the MediaNews family of newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Daily News and Long Beach Press Telegram.

A bit misleading to say 11 papers, since all are owned by the same company, which clearly ordered up this editorial. But it’s good to see a newspaper company taking a real stand, and being activist in its approach to critical events.

And that struck me as a really bad idea, but when a presidential campaign calls up and offers you a job you take it.

Really? There’s no boundary one should fail to cross when offered a presidential-campaign job? Not in Goldfarb’s world, apparently.

At least readers of this person’s writing now have a solid sense of his ethical standards.

Our government’s current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.

Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade. Their frequent cheerleading for bad practices — and near-total failure to warn us, repeatedly and relentlessly, of what was building — made a bad situation worse.

From the Los Angeles Times: Rosa Brooks’ Dec. 11 column described Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich as “newly indicted.” He has only been charged in a federal corruption case.

Huh?

Gene Koo: Obama’s non-reductive rhetoric. The technology to bypass top-down media is one cornerstone of Obama’s success as a communicator. His nonreductive rhetoric is another.

But the article names just a few of the donors. We’re free to speculate about the rest, but why should we have to? Why not post all of the names, and amounts so we can see who else is on the list and what they gave? Better yet, why not put the database online so other folks can crunch the numbers to see if they get other interesting results?

The Post gets the Internet better than some newspapers, but obviously it still has a lot to learn.

Glenn Greenwald (Salon): Establishment Washington unifies against prosecutions. As confirmed accounts emerged years ago of chronic presidential lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, systematic torture, rendition, “black site” prisons, corruption in every realm, and all sorts of other dark crimes, where were journalists and other opinion-making elites? Very few of them with any significant platform can point to anything they did or said to oppose or stop any of it — and they know that. Many of them, even when much of this became conclusively proven, were still explicitly praising Bush officials. Most of them supported the underlying enabling policies (Guantanamo and the permanent state of war in Iraq and “on terror”), and then cheered on laws — the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act — designed to legalize these activities and retroactively immunize the lawbreakers and war criminals from prosecution. So when these media and political elites are defending Bush officials, mitigating their crimes, and arguing that they shouldn’t be held accountable, they’re actually defending themselves. Just as Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller can’t possibly demand investigations for crimes in which they were complicit, media stars can’t possibly condemn acts which they supported or, at the very best, towards which they turned a blissfully blind eye. They can’t indict Bush officials for what they did because to do so would be to indict themselves. Bush officials need to be exonerated, or at least have their crimes forgotten (look to the future and ignore the past, they all chime in unison), so that their own involvement in it will also be cleansed and then forgotten.

This is a harsh indictment, but it’s hard to argue with Greenwald. With rare exceptions, Washington journalists have been complicit in the lawbreaking that characterized the Bush administration. Now, even as they admit that the crimes were crimes, they want everyone to forgive and forget — but mostly forget.

This is another chapter in the breakdown of journalism as one of the few institutions that holds power accountable. In this case, it would mean holding journalism accountable, too. Not going to happen.