The Chicago Tribune has an article criticizing the

media world where questionable truths joust with plausible fictions, agendas are often hidden, and motives are frequently mixed . . .

Refreshing to see Big Media turning the magnifying glass on itself in an honest fashion.

What’s that you say? That quote is about blogs?

Never mind.

The article is pretty dang snarky about the potential dark, hidden motives of bloggers. It describes an interview with the person who runs Rathergate.com:

“Blogs are supremely transparent,” Krempasky said in a telephone interview. “With a very few exceptions, bloggers are real people that can be reached and talked to and held up to the light.”

Nowhere on Krempasky’s site, however, did he disclose that he is the political director for American Target Advertising, a Virginia firm run by Richard Viguerie, the conservative strategist widely credited with inventing political direct mail and helping Ronald Reagan and numerous other Republicans get elected.

The episode was hardly isolated.

“Buckhead,” the mysterious blogger on freerepublic.com who was among the first to raise questions about the authenticity of the documents within hours of Rather’s broadcast, declined repeated requests from the Chicago Tribune and other media to reveal his identity.

But on Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Buckhead” is Harry MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

That revelation will likely fuel the suspicions of some Democrats that Republicans were behind a scheme to discredit CBS by supplying the network with fake documents.

Of course, there are quite often little tidbits about reporters that don’t get reported.

Take, for example, Bill Arkin, who until recently was an L.A. Times reporter on military issues — and who famously misquoted Gen. Boykin. As I pointed out in this post:

Arkin’s e-mail address, listed in his byline, traces to igc.org, the home page for a radical leftist organization called the “Institute for Global Communications.”

Or take L.A. Times reporter Ken Silverstein, whom I took to task in this post for blatantly misrepresenting quotes in a Sunday talk show. Silverstein’s bio describes him as follows:

Freelance writer, Washington, D.C., contributing editor of Harper’s magazine, Washington editor of Mother Jones, contributor to The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon.com, Slate, The American Prospect and Washington Monthly, 1993 -2003.

I am quite sure that these random examples only scratch the surface of what you’d find if you really started looking into the backgrounds of mainstream media reporters.

If the mainstream media insists on investigating the backgrounds of the bloggers, what makes reporters immune from such scrutiny?

UPDATE: Welcome to Instapundit readers, and thanks to the Professor for the link! I hope new readers who like what they see will bookmark the site.