Maureen Dowd is upset about male authority figures:

The networks don't even give lip service to looking for women and blacks for anchor jobs - they just put pretty-boy clones in the pipeline.

"I think we're still stuck in a society that looks at white males as authority figures," Mr. Brokaw conceded.

Bill Carter, a TV reporter at The Times, agreed: "Katie Couric may be a much bigger star and even more experienced than Brian Williams. But when the next 9/11 happens, it'll be Brian, not Katie, in the central role. The attitude still seems to be, 'We want a daddy in that chair.' "

...you work in a medium where you would still be doing the traffic report back in Elmira, N.Y. if you looked like Dennis Kucinich. In other words, you've got your job because you're pretty. I'm not sure you should be shooting your mouth off about other people's qualifications to do the news. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

It's interesting that pretty daddy Williams' bathroom attack was launched shortly after Bill O'Reilly called Dan Rather a victim who'd been "slimed." Not that I like ad hominem attacks, but Rather was not attacked for being Dan Rather (which, after all, he's been for decades), but for adamantly refusing to do what any blogger would do if he relied on forged documents: admit and correct his mistake.

But wait a minute! No true "authority figure" is ever supposed to admit making mistakes! Not even pretty daddies.

This may touch on a crucial distinction between bloggers and the MSM. By launching his latest attack on the blogosphere, O'Reilly makes clear that it is not attacks per se that he is against; indeed, how could this quarrelsome, pugnacious man oppose attacking others? Rather, his quarrel is over who should get to do the attacking. O'Reilly thinks that only the anointed -- what used to be called "the authorities" -- should have such privileges.

As Eugene Volokh (via Glenn Reynolds) made clear in today's New York Times, these so-called authorities should enjoy no special privileges. Yet they do. It's one thing for someone to be hired because he has a pretty face, or has an authoritative "look" which might assist in bringing bigger network ratings. But when special legal privileges are granted exempting the pretty daddies from the same rules which apply to everyone else, that's unelected power. I can't think of a worse form of tyranny than actually making a real authority figure out of someone hired largely because of his appearance. Where is the accountability? Are doctrines of Constitutional Law henceforth to be driven by network ratings?

Worse yet, once exemptions from the law are created, the authority figures will want them extended. Bill O'Reilly has it in for the blogosphere because they repeatedly dared to criticize him. This, he feels, is unfair, because only he and similarly situated "authorities" should be allowed the First Amendment right to criticize. By implication, O'Reilly imagines that bloggers are "immune" from criticism and the tactics of "sliming" he condemns. He forgets that bloggers are all in the same playing field. They can just as easily be criticized -- and have their jobs threatened -- as can Bill O'Reilly or Dan Rather. (More here from Joe Gandelman, via Glenn Reynolds.) The difference is that in the blogosphere, while there may be unfairness, there's no anointed, unaccountable class. It's pretty much a level playing field and a meritocracy.

That's something many of the Old Media authorities and like-minded people would love to change. How? Installation of gate-keepers was proposed back in 1999, but never implemented.

I suppose the "authorities" could always orchestrate a vast "sliming" of individual bloggers, but the blogosphere has already shown itself to be pretty resilient.

Many of us are accustomed to being slimed . . .

Besides, as O'Reilly himself admits, we can't be fired!

MORE: As a typical example of what distinguishes blogging from MSM reporting [in this case, opinion writing], in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Monica Yant Kinney attempts to target SUV drivers for shame/blame in the context of the recent Delaware River oil spill:

Seventy percent of the oil that winds up in Northeastern SUVs first makes a pit stop along the Delaware.

(More below on the oil spill.)