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Via ThinkProgress, I was just watching a clip from this morning’s Chris Matthews Show in which Matthews and his panel of establishment journalists decry the lack of fact-checking “on the blogs”:

Given the mainstream media’s disturbing habit of regurgitating talking points and political propaganda, I find this claim to be pretty laughable. The linked post does a good job of taking it apart, so I won’t bother duplicating their work.

Early in the clip, though, Matthews and Time’s Joe Klein briefly raise the point that without large, traditional news organizations like newspapers and national magazines, there wouldn’t be journalists at foreign desks to covers events in other countries. This argument is one that critics of new media tend to make quite a bit when arguing for stuff like paywalls , monopoly exemptions, and prohibitions against linking: If we don’t preserve the existing business models of big media companies like the NYT and the Associated Press, then who will cover stuff that happens in other countries?

Here’s a suggestion: how about the people who live in other countries?

I’m no media expert, but it seems like the need for journalistic entities such as “the foreign desk” and “the Baghdad bureau” made sense when someone writing about what was going on in some far-away country had no means of getting her/his work out to the public. Now, though? Not so much.

Why does Time need to pay for Joe Klein to spend a year overseas uploading blog posts, when there are a whole bunch of people who live there doing the same thing?

At its core, this argument largely seems to be about American journalists who don’t think anyone else can cover the news like they can, and who are looking to preserve the business model that has been sending them around the world.