Whiny, Bitchy NYTimes Reporter Hates to Be Called on His Propaganda

New York Times reporter James Risen is fighting back against critics who have cast a skeptical eye on his Page One story yesterday about Afghanistan's mineral deposits. In an interview with Yahoo! News, Risen dismissed suspicions that the story was part of an orchestrated campaign to rescue the troubled American effort there and derided critical bloggers as pajama-clad layabouts with no reporting chops.

(snip)

Risen didn't take kindly to the blogospheric criticism. "Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas," Risen said.

"The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people's stories," Risen told Yahoo! News during an increasingly hostile interview, which he called back to apologize for almost immediately after it ended. "Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think." (Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush administration's secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.)

Nice 33 insertion there.

Btw, this quote basically proves the story WAS propaganda:

"Several months ago, Milt started telling me about what they were finding," Risen said. "At the beginning of the year, I said I wanted to do a story on it." At first both Bearden and Brinkley resisted, Risen said, but he eventually wore them down. "Milt convinced Brinkley to talk to me," he said, "and Brinkley convinced other Pentagon officials to go on the record. I think Milt realized that things were going so badly in Afghanistan that people would be willing to talk about this."