In Meta Spiral, Wonkette Hates Self

Last month I discussed NBC Washington's lame attempts at humor by sprinkling in near-parody news stories in with their "real" news online. Mostly this attack was aimed at Wonkette's Jim Newell, who has been posting snark-filled attempts at humor on NBCWashington.com.

DCist later picked up on the story too, starting an flame war with Wonkette.

Now, Wonkette runs a story attacking TIME Magazine for running a joke piece.

Some of the choice selections:

YOU DO NOT “PARODY” THE NEWS IN THE PROCESS OF REPORTING THE NEWS. You people are supposed to be covering things, writing articles about those things, doing research, conducting interviews, filing your articles, and then going home to cry, the end.

You people probably love that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and especially those wacky typos Jay Leno sometimes holds up, on the teevee.

WELL YOU DON’T GET TO DO THAT.

That is not your job. If you want to try your hand at writing jokes for Comedy Central or working for The Onion, then by all means quit, today, and start sending in your resumes, which will thankfully be ignored, because you people aren’t comedy writers. You’re self-important mandarins in an industry that’s actually dying, right now, in large part because you people have the intellectual wherewithal of a raccoon distracted by a ball of aluminum foil. You see blogs and you don’t say, “Hmmm that is an interesting development in new media.” Instead, you lose your fucking institutional mind and turn newspapers into blogs. Because that’s what we were short of, in this country, right?

Yes, exactly. I couldn't agree more. So while you're at it, how about you send that memo to Jim Newell and NBC Washington?

In fact, I couldn't say this better myself!

You, as journalists, are not allowed to constantly bemoan the fate of serious news-gathering operations in this country while trying to turn your news operations into TMZ. Stop it.

Stop twittering, blogging, photoshopping, and dear god please stop trying to make jokes. Report the news or take your buyout and go fuck off with Mark Penn or whatever.

So how about it Ken Layne? You going to fire off an angry email or tweet to your fellow Wonkette writer for wasting everyone's time by filling NBCWashington.com with second-rate attempts at humor? Shouldn't NBC be spending their time and money actually reporting on the news?