Contempt for bloggers who are not associated with a mainstream, daily newspaper is a New York Times lite motif. They don't believe Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. They believe bloggers are the competition, and should be trashed. Don't take my word for it. Look at how they crop their photographs.

During two decades as an ink-stained wretch with mainstream, daily newspapers, I learned that it was insulting to the subjects of a photograph to chop their heads off (photographically). And the Times gives us a pair of bloggers -- heads lopped off.

I was also taught that it was insulting to my audience to publish such mangled photographs. Photographers like the late Bill Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who worked for the Fayetteville Observer, told me that publishing a poorly cropped photograph meant I thought my readers were "too stupid to know a good picture from a bad one."

Go to Timesman Adam Nagourney's Gathering Highlights Power of the Blog and have a look.

That story will shortly recede into the Times' pay-to-look archives.

That particular photograph may disappear altogether.

But the lite motif of contempt for independent bloggers, which has been playing for years, can reasonably be expected to play on.

From my seat, far from the front of this music hall, it has the ugly tone of an entrenched institutional prejudice.