Kathleen Parker must be nervous about losing her position as the conservative pundit most able to serve up what liberal media outlets like to hear. So she cooks up the perfect potion to suit liberal tastes, arguing that the decline of the mainstream media is caused by scruffy media critics. Wow.

Had we only known the power and influence of those who dared to point out the biases, negligence, omissions and banality of the mainstream news. It wasn’t those underlying factors or the rise of Craigslist that undermined their ad revenue. It wasn’t even the emergence of point-of-view online journalism which did the trick. No, the conservative media critics accomplished all that. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Then Parker offers up the hackneyed argument that Rush Limbaugh is the real elitist because he’s rich. Sigh. She apparently missed the “cling to guns” discussion during the campaign and  a dozen more incidents making it clear that elitism is a function of viewpoint and attitude — not back account.

But the real problem with Parker’s analysis is that it imagines a media that doesn’t exist.  She waxes lyrical about:

the daily-grind reporters who turn out for city council and school board meetings. Or the investigative teams who chase leads for months to expose abuse or corruption. These are the champions of the industry, not the food-fighters on TV or the grenade throwers on radio. Or the bloggers (with a few exceptions), who may be excellent critics and fact-checkers, but who rely on newspapers to provide their material.

Well, that bears little resemblance to the reality of journalism today. Many of the most hobbled media dinosaurs ignore local news altogether. Ever try looking for coverage of the Los Angeles City Council in the Los Angeles Times? And while some reporters “chase leads for months” ( the Washington Post’s investigation of Walter Reed comes to mind) they often seem to be in the news-hiding business. Which is why, for example, the real progress in the Iraq War was first told by bloggers like Michael Yon and only revealed months and months later by the New York Times. And that’s why stories like Chas Freeman were reported almost exclusively in the blogosphere.

Whatever the facts, Parker’s tale of woe is plainly what the mainstream media barons want to hear. But really what help is it? If you decry the critics and keep on doing what you’ve been doing chances are the trends will continue. More and more news outlets will close. And that seems to be exactly where we are heading.