New York Times' managing editor Jill Abramson defended the newspaper industry the other day and continued the ongoing jihad against blogs, according to the New York Sun.

In her defense of print journalism, she said new technologies do not always replace the old ones and "brand names that carry authority and quality" will continue to flourish.

But not if they continue to alienate long-time readers and allow the quality to slide in the name of the bottom line.

She distinguished the Times from many bloggers, saying, "We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion."

Once again, another elite, highly paid, mainstream New York journalist demonstrates a glaring ignorance of the Internet and a bias against a democratic online environment where the masses can turn for information without having to pay through the nose - and kill millions of trees in the process.

Bloggers were among the critics who first pointed out the flaws in the "verification" of former New York Times correspondent Judith Miller's reporting about weapons of mass destruction in the run up to war in Iraq, including this blogger and former Times free-lance reporter, who was ignored by the national desk when trying to get the great New York Times to "verify" that there was a secret report that contradicted Miller's reporting and showed what we now consider conventional wisdom: The Iraq War was planned by the neo-con think tanks before 9/11.

"Call newspapers dinosaurs if you like," Abramson said. "But remember that dinosaurs walked the earth for millions of years."

True, but we suspect if dinosaurs had had doctors and critics, it would have been easy to spot when they became so sick that their extinction became predictable and inevitable.

We would love to teach the staff at the Bill Keller New York Times a few Internet tricks that would make their job of verification easier, like how to use Google Alerts to find out when editors say stupid things without having to spend a lot of money and time looking for it. But it is clear they are not interested in the truth anymore.

I once advised the Howell Raines New York Times to take on its critics, but I was talking about the Rush Limbaughs of the world, not Web journalists and commentators who try just as hard to verify information as anyone – and provide links in their stories to prove it.