John Temple, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, following the lead of your favorite blogger (I mean ME!), has ripped into Editor & Publisher.

If you read Greg Mitchell's columns on Iraq and now the Israel/Hezbollah conflict it's clear why Editor & Publisher has become increasingly irrelevant.

Mitchell, the editor of the trade magazine and web site, spends a lot of time taking on the press from a liberal/left viewpoint.

[snip]

But I think Mitchell is mistaking standard opinion journalism for media criticism. There are plenty of places to debate the right approach to Iraq or to the current Mideast Crisis, but what he's doing is not media criticism.

Even if he's going to wear his politics on his sleeve, he should be taking on the quality of the reporting, not recounting his unhappiness with the editorial positions of journalists or newspapers. At a minimum, he should have his Web site provide an opposing view. But what he should really do to make his publication relevant is critique journalism, not tell us what he thinks newspapers should be saying on their editorial pages or in their columns.

You can find a couple of related bits over at Romenesko's Media News.

Temple has Mitchell pegged -- but don't expect to see any changes over at E&P. For old leftists like Mitchell, the opposing viewpoint is by definition invalid. Mitchell has sunk so far into BDS that he's incapable of forming a reasonable news judgment about anything.