I believe it

From Belmont Club this [bolding mine] great essay on the media and the Left.

The High Hand
Glenn Reynolds notes that the New York Times coverage of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan may not really be about prisoner abuse or even Afghanistan, but about maintaining the prestige of Newsweek. He calls it 'circling the wagons', the idea being to teach press critics an object lesson in how expensive it is to humiliate the mass media by catching them at sloppy reporting by flooding the zone with stories similar to the one which was discredited . That may or may not be the case, but it is nearly undeniable that the effect of the media's coverage of American misdeeds has been to make the slightest infraction against enemy combatants ruinously expensive."

And from the incomparably brilliant Mark Steyn:

In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs -- not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.

Watching the media circling the wagons around the beleaguered Isikoff this week, Martin Peretz of the New Republic described them as ''a profession that is complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself.'' The media are the message: But, hey, enough about the war, let's talk about me...

This disaster took a combination of factors. We can't do much about Muslim fanatics; we probably can't do much about our self-worshipping vanity media whose reflexive counter-tribalism has robbed it of all sense of perspective or proportion.

"Self-workshing vanity media" is a great description of the media that flaunts awards they give themselves as if they were deserved. They talk about Pulitzer prize winning as if that, and and a $5 bill could get you frappachino at Starbucks. It's long past the time that such awards meant anything to anyone except the self-obsessed media, probably because such "honors" as the Peabody award given this month to Dan Rather after he was forced to resign because of his perfidity and 60 Minutes Wednesday was cancelled because of lousy ratings. A honor for a loser. But, then a lot of these media self-awards have come down to that. Pep talks for the troops.