In today’s paper, NYT media critic David Carr writes a long and pointless piece about pot-stirring, Jackie-doxxing blogger Charles C. Johnson.

He concludes with these words: My worry is that people who have made it this far in the column will click over to GotNews to see what all the fuss is about.

If that’s how you feel, why write the profile at all?

Especially because a) the Washington Post already did it last week, and b) it’s not as if the Times has exactly excelled in its reporting of Rolling Stone’s bogus UVa rape article. There is plenty of other work the Times’ media columnist could be doing.

Nobody likes to criticize David Carr because he has a lot of friends in the media and because he is powerful. And also because he has done such a good job promoting his story of drug addiction that he’s created a sort of triumphant-victim persona for himself.

But I’m never going to work at the New York Times, so…why not?

This piece feels lazy, the work of a guy who’s been scooped by a blogger (yours truly) and a metro reporter, T. Rees Shapiro, and Hanna Rosin, among others, and has reached the point in his career where getting scooped doesn’t really bother him—the “I’d rather be a pundit” phase; Carr now spends two days a week teaching at Boston University. Carr also spends a lot of time going to conferences—TechCrunch, South by Southwest, the ANA Brand Conference, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Internet Week New York, the Harvard Kennedy School, or giving the 2012 Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecture at U.T.-Austin or the UC-Berekely J. School’s 2014 commencement address or—well, you get the point. You have to wonder if all this outside activity takes away from his time to actually, you know, report. Or maybe he just thinks that he’s too grand to travel to Charlottesville and knock on doors.

David Carr, I should add, once wrote a piece about me which I didn’t think was particularly fair but wasn’t the worst. That was about ten years ago. What struck me at the time really was how under-reported it was. Carr had lunch with me for about an hour, then made a few phone calls to other people and that was it. The profile of Chuck Johnson seems even less reported: It appears to be based entirely on one phone call with Johnson, and the rest is filler—Carr opining. This is the slapdash work of a reporter who is overcommitted, burned-out, lazy or some combination of the above. (A not uncommon problem among Times columnists, to be fair.) Carr is going through the motions.

What frustrates me about today’s piece goes beyond the fact that it’s odd to write about Chuck Johnson and then add the caveat that you don’t want Chuck Johnson to get any more publicity. There’s an MSM/NYT arrogance there: The only thing you need to know about this guy is what I’m telling you.

But the real loss is that there is a really interesting social media story to be written about the collapse of Rolling Stone’s article: The part that social media played in undercutting a story that the mainstream media left unquestioned for weeks.

Yes, of course, that’s a self-serving thing to say, I concede that, but it’s truly not why I make the suggestion—I just think it’s a more interesting story than “Chuck Johnson is a scumbag, so read my column and not his blog.”

And there are plenty more people who could and should be included in a discussion of online criticism of Rolling Stone’s story: Robbie Soave, Steve Sailer and others, I’m sure. You could even include the role that Anna Merlan and others of her political leaning played.

Of course, that would have required Carr to make more than one phone call.

And that’s an article that would make the establishment media look bad. And Carr—who, once upon a time, used to write for Washington City Paper, a terrific alternative weekly in D.C.—really does see himself as the voice from Mount Olympus these days. “[Johnson] is not without some talent,” Carr writes.

So it is not surprising that The Times’ media reporter chose to write a piece that makes bloggers look bad. But it is a missed opportunity…as is all the Times’ coverage of what’s going on at UVa.