Writers strike coverage was hazardous duty

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-et-channel18feb18,0,6138195.story

The media blasted one another, and bloggers left a big impression.

By CHANNEL ISLAND

IT'S official: The strike drove writers nuts.

No, not TV and film writers. Journalists.

Fourteen weeks of covering bitter trench warfare between the Writers Guild of America and the studios, and the ink-stained wretches are feeling wretched. It's not just that covering a complex, polarizing news story for more than three months left them fried. The worst part has been the blowback. And we don't mean from the studios and networks, either. No, friends, it's the ugliest kind of warfare: writer on writer.

You recall Woody Allen's joke about intellectuals: They're like the mob. They only kill their own.

Consider that the strike hadn't even started when outspoken guild members -- suddenly multiplying like accused Communists during the Red Scares -- began sharpening their pikes for the heads of Variety's staff, whom they quickly condemned as the studio bosses' bootlickers. Strange but, during normal times, scenarists' biggest gripe against the trades is that they don't run their photos big enough when splashing a script sale across the front page.

Nikki Finke, whose blog www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com functions as a kind of cross between Louella Parsons and Madame DeFarge, launched vituperative, near-daily attacks on strike news in competing outlets, including this newspaper, one of her former employers (last month, she told movie columnist Patrick Goldstein to "stop shilling" for the studios after he wrote a column she didn't like).

And last week, the New York Press newspaper put New York Times reporter Michael Cieply (another former Los Angeles Times staffer) on the couch. Using his strike dispatches as evidence, the analysis found the patient suffering from a chronic case of Anti-Labor Disorder, brought about by his publicly unacknowledged need for the "industry respect" that "he so clearly craved."

FULL story at link.