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The last great spat among high-profile media folks was between James Woolcott and Kurt Andersen. Today, the sparks are flying between Jack Shafer and Michael Wolff.

We don’t have strong preferences for a winner, although we have a couple of peanut-gallery-type observations to make. Shafer is by far the more thorough and accountable reporter, Wolff is the better writer. Neither is a particularly sympathetic character, and therefore neither can possibly come off very honorably in a clash of egos. To the credit of both, neither is afraid to take their whacks at sacred cows—and having undergone a slowish process of canonization themselves in the past five years, each is now mooing the protests of the whackee. (This is new territory for Shafer. Recall: he is the doyen of Slate, the would-be editor-in-chief who probably deserved Michael Kinsley’s job more than Jake Weisberg did, but probably had his fill of being management back in his Washington City Paper days; Wolff, who has received many well-deserved whacks over the years, inexplicably landed at a columnist’s desk at New York magazine. He is a writer who’s single victory in the meritocracy was a tepid, trendy book about his failure as an internet mogul… come to think of it, we can’t recall a better example of someone in media who has so dramatically failed upward his whole public career.)

You can call a reporter or a media critic just about any name in the book, and he’ll take it as a compliment (something about being “old school,” or “hard-bitten” or a “stogie-smoking leathershoe” and all that nonsense), but don’t ever accuse him of being lazy. Aside from running violently against the nap of our perpetual martyr complex, it smacks of an ethical violation. And no one is more sensitive about ethical violations than a journalist.

Jack Shafer has been banging on about how terrible he thinks PBS news is—in particular, we recall his cheap shots at Lehrer’s News Hour. His main problem seems to be that it makes him sleepy. There’s no pleasing Shafer, apparently—because if it’s not a spectacular ethical lapse in the showers with Biill O’Reilly, then its the transgression of being too tweedy and unsexy. For our part, we like the thoughtful, civilized, literate News Hour. It is the efforts to update the program salaciously—particularly by employing blowhards like Brooks and Shields—that ultimately are the weakest elements in the program. Maybe it could stand an infusion of quirkiness—God knows, a show like Almanac is spilling over with little else—but this is hardly a deal-breaker. We like News Hour just fine the way it is; it’s the only TV news we can stomach, even if we have to shut our eyes when Ray Suarez is onscreen (to believe its really him).

We disagree with Shafer’s thoughtful piece at Slate this week on defunding and decommissioning the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. His is a cogent and pursuasive argument (although seemingly designed to steer me into a late morning nap—hey, live by the sword, die by the sword, Jack) that politicians tampering with media is a bad thing. And yet, at the same time, he claims that the partisan lens is as good as any through which to view the world. By way of example, Shafer writes:

“Now under Moyers polled conservatives for their views, while the Editorial Report mostly reiterates the Wall Street Journal editorial-page line. Yet editorial “balance” is not what either show needs—both benefit from looking at current events through ideological lenses. I’d rather watch a Miele soak cycle than view either program sanitized to CPB charter standards.”

Aside from Shafer here revealing himself to be a domestic snob (Miele? Good God, man, that’s no way to curry populist outrage), this strikes on a growing consciousness among readers, editors, and media critics that the whole conceit of “balance” in reporting is silly and itself has a skewing effect. One fine Times letter-writer described equal-opportunity journalism as “pitting a saint against a horse thief and saying ‘only time will tell,’” which is the neatest metaphor we’ve heard in connection with this issue of tit-for-tat sourcing.) This all sounds like a red herring, as far as we’re concerned. Sure there are egregious examples, but it is hardly a trend, and we figure that when it does happen, it probably happens for all the right reasons.

We think the CPB provides for a constant, annual checking mechanism each time funding comes up—resulting in the usual articles in publications like the Times and Slate. Ultimately, funding is nonpartisan—or at least bi-partisan. Yes, in contentionous times where there is a tyranny of the majority, there are good reasons to worry that “balance” is merely a federal bludgeon to bang PBS programming firmly to the right of center, but the government’s involvement is a guarantee of a certain amount of transparency that does not exist in the commercial media world.

It is no accident that the whole world outside US borders (and much of it within US borders) still considers the gold standard of news not ABC, NBC, or CBS—but the publicly funded BBC. What is the closest thing Americans have to the BBC, not in terms of funding, but in terms of quality, balance, authoritativeness, and substance—the American standard by which all others are measured, every time someone grinds out a study of journalism standards and practices? It is NPR and PBS.

We think Lehrer is a fine example of high-quality journalism and we feel confident that the News Hour can be entrusted to weigh balance against fairness. Part of the job of broadcasting the news is the wisdom to lay out the facts and analysis in a considered way which clearly points to the truth while ackowledging any lingering, legitimate doubts—not from the flat-earthers or the creationists but from thoughtful, serious dissenters with substantive evidence for a contrary interpretation of the facts.

Apropos of Monday’s article in the Times that “print is here to stay”: We would rather read a magazine or a book on paper. The quality of most newspapers (and, to be fair, a good many magazines) resonates well with the populist qualities of the internet. In our experience, most newspaper articles do not demand a deep read, where the reading experience would be enhanced by a premium medium. Companies that produce a lot of low-quality print—simple, dumbed-down narratives, quick-hit info-blurbs, ads for sexual services, the general infantilization of mass print media—had better worry about the internet. Raw information, service journalism, even broad-band advertising campaigns are infinitely reproducible, and they work fine in an infinite-reproduction medium like the internet. This sort of information gains or loses nothing by being on a web page, pasted into an email, or even queued to the color laser printer. This is as close to raw text as language can be, and there is no reason why the medium should have a significant impact on the reading experience. The instant, low-cost, low-impact world of the web is the perfect vehicle for this kind of reading.

Conversely, high-quality print has nothing to worry about. Hardcover novels aren’t going anywhere, for the simple reason that no one wants to read them on a computer screen. Alternatively, plenty of people are reading newspapers solely online (this sometimes gets us into trouble!)—the better to avoid the hassle of recycling a lot of paper that lives and dies without a living human being ever setting eyes on it.

In other words, the old cliche that no one likes to read a lot of text online is only partially true. If it’s good text that you really want to wrap your mind and your lap around, you want to see it on paper, freed from its delivery device. If you want to get in and get out with some useful information, the web is your medium. Or you can read standing up in the bookstore.

We think this truth is demonstrable on a simple, mechanical level. As computers and desktop publishing have advanced, the letter form itself has gotten better, clearer, and stronger—on the printed page. Isn’t it interesting that the gold standard for resolution on paper has risen into the stratosphere—say a minimum of 300 DPI, but why not shoot for 1000?—while the tools for creating that sort of photo-realistic resolution have stayed the same? In other words, computers are still operating in a paradigm of print: If the ultimate output is going to be on paper, then it had better look as close as possible to the real thing (i.e. letter press, or plate printer.) This is a bit like using a sharp chisel to do work that looks as if it were done with a razor blade, because the basic resolution of the CRT screen (and its flat-screen equivalents) has not changed. It is still woefully low, at 72 dots per inch. Newer operating systems like Mac OS X have tried to anti-alias the edges of letter forms—the better to make letters and words on your screen look as if they are the resolution of a printed (even letter-pressed) word, but without actually increasing the resolution of the hardware itself. So no matter what trickery is used to amp up their appearance online and onscreen, they cannot have the same look and feel as printed words on paper until there are some dramatic breakthroughs in screens and screen resolution.

It’s like audio. If all you want is a phone number, hearing a prerecorded message over the phone is just fine. If you want to hear Beethoven’s Seventh, you might prefer a CD, a stereo, and some good speakers.