There's an old warning to those who would take on newspapers cautioning them against going after a business that buys ink by the barrel. Nowadays that isn't even accurate; newspapers buy ink by the tanker truck.

But if there's one thing true about the Internet and the proliferation of cheap, easy-to-use publishing tools it's that the pixels on a computer screen can give the old media a run for their money.

I don't cover every media debacle here at Hoystory, simply because this is a part time passion, I've got a full-time job and writing about every old-media screw-up would be a full-time job and then some. So you'll have to forgive me for my failure to cover the Bobby Caina Calvan dustup last month.

Calvan made his name on the Internet by posting to his personal blog a story of how he made a royal jerk out of himself when he bullied a soldier on guard duty in the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad. Calvan was working for The Sacramento Bee at the time. (For a more extensive summary of this incident, go here.)

Well, it turns out that Calvan is strictly an amateur when it comes egotism and arrogance. He should bow to the master, Bee Public Editor Armando Acuna. Acuna uses his latest column take aim at the blogosphere, promptly swings the rifle around and shoots himself in the foot.

Calvan then wrote about the encounter in a snarky, arrogant way – including his attempt to "bully" the soldier – on his new personal blog, which was intended to keep his family and friends updated about his work and life in Iraq.

Except the blog wasn't so private, as Calvan found to his everlasting embarrassment and chagrin.

A day after his Oct. 23 blog posting, Calvan woke up at 5 a.m. in his Baghdad hotel room and signed onto his computer.

"My e-mail started going crazy," he recounted in a phone call several days ago while on a reporting trip along the Kurdistan border. "That's when I started receiving all this hate mail."

His private blog was now whizzing around the very public blogosphere, put there by right-wing critics breathlessly passing it around like the discovery of a deep, dark secret, a digital Rosetta stone deciphering the media's true heart.

Is this the '80s? Seriously. A "private blog" on the Internet? Nothing is private on the Internet. Don't even try that "private" line unless, at the very least, there's a password protecting the content, and even then it's probably a mistake to believe that anything on a publicly accessible server is "private."

As for using that to determine the "media's true heart," we didn't need Calvan for that. He was just another straw on the camel's back.

It's as if the armchair critics were pointing a big, fat finger and saying, "Aha, we caught you!"

They then proceeded to use Calvan's blog to blame The Bee, the McClatchy Washington Bureau (which supervises foreign coverage) and the mainstream media for every perceived journalistic sin known to man in Iraq.

"It was used by people with a political agenda," said Mark Seibel, managing editor in charge of foreign coverage for McClatchy's Washington Bureau. "They were trying to discredit our reporting coming out of Iraq."

No, Calvan discredited your reporting coming out of Iraq. If Seibel supervises the foreign coverage, then supervise it. Be proactive in choosing who you send over to cover this conflict. Try to make sure you're not sending over a jerk.

Seibel noted that it's common for reporters everywhere to talk their way past guards and security, whether it's on a city street in the United States or dealing with sentries in a foreign land.

"Bobby's mistake was blogging about it and expressing his frustration."

I've talked my way past police roadblocks before. I've occasionally become frustrated when some rookie cop doesn't know that a newspaper reporter technically isn't considered a "member of the public" when it comes to covering fires or other national disasters. (I refer you to California Penal Code Section 409.5(d) ) I was never a jerk about it, and usually a request that he radio his higher-ups quickly solved the problem.

It's not that Calvan tried to talk his way past a soldier. It's the fact that he pulled out the "do you know who I am" card.

But really what I think is that this matter is entirely overblown and what is needed is this: a time out.

What we're talking about here is an escalating, ahem, urination competition between two men in a stressful situation. Just two guys making each other mad – doesn't matter if you're right-wing, left-wing, up or down.

For critics, it's like taking an argument between two men involved in a fender-bender and making sweeping judgments about the ills of the auto industry.

Excuse my French, but that's a piss-poor analogy. One guy (the soldier) is doing his job, and the other guy is a self-important jerk (the reporter) trying to wield his perceived authority like a club.

He compounded his error by initially deleting his posting, which is considered bad form in the blogosphere. (The etiquette was news to me, too.)

Wow! Back to the '80s again. Acuna doesn't get the blogosphere at all. Does the newspaper go into the back issues and cut mistakes out of the paper? Black out parts of the microfilm? Delete erroneous statements from their digital archives?

No. They make a correction and append it to the original article -- a standard many bloggers adhere to.

Acuna, do you have a computer on your desk or a manual typewriter?

What I want to know is whether the blogosphere's trip-wire is just mindlessly sensitive in igniting outrage or was it just a slow week in the conservatives' Internet neighborhood?

The real shame, of course, is how this Internet conniption fit over something so minor overshadows the serious journalism from Iraq. There are legitimate reader questions about coverage and stories, their selection, tone, balance and accuracy.

In the grand scheme of things, it's minor. That's why I didn't write about it the first time.

However, before you throw your shoulder out patting yourself on the back, why don't you take a second look at what the media, including your newspaper, is putting out on a daily basis about "coverage and stories, their selection, tone, balance and accuracy" and get back to me on whether you're answering those big questions or whether your coverage is more indicative of a "slow week."

Flipping back through your Nation/World coverage the only article on Iraq that I could find for the past week that wasn't police blotter stuff was this one on more than 3,000 Iraqis returning to a safer Baghdad -- and it was an Associated Press story.

Doctor, heal thyself.

On a related note: Dan Riehl has some biographical background on Calvan here. I must confess that I believed Calvan to be in his early- to mid-20s when I first read about this incident. It appears instead that he is closer to 40 years old, chronologically. My earlier belief about his emotional age is still accurate.