New York Times’ public editor Clark Hoyt weighed in this past weekend on recent “transgressions” by three Times journalists — Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman and Edmund Andrews.  Hoyt describes the first two  as “star columnists” and Andrews as an economics writer.

Phrases like “star columnist” and “ethics police” didn’t resonate so well with Megan Garber, who writes in the Columbia Journalism Review that Hoyt seemed too dismissive of those challenging the Times’ writers.

From Garber’s article:

Let’s leave aside the fact that Hoyt’s column vastly underplays the transgressions in question within it-MoDowd’s, in particular. (After a quick, he-said/she-said summary of the scandal, Hoyt declares: “I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right….If the words are not hers, she must give credit.” And then he moves on.) To my mind, there’s an even bigger problem in Hoyt’s column than the particularities of its conclusions: its assumption-and, thus, its enforcement-of an oppositional relationship between Times reporters and…everyone else. (Blogosphere? “Aflame with charges of plagiarism.” Times reporter? “Burned to illuminate a national crisis through his personal experience.” Yeesh-talk about fire in a crowded theater.)

The public editor is engaging, in all this, in a peculiar brand of institutional defensiveness. One that plays itself out via divisiveness-and via, in particular, a false dichotomy that aggrandizes Times reporters and dismisses those who are not. In particular, those nagging, nattering bloggers. (Outsiders! Pouncers! Rougher-uppers!) And he does so right in his lede: there are those “within” the Times, “trying to protect the paper’s integrity”…and then there are those “outside” it, “ready to pounce on transgressions by Times journalists.”

And later, Garber writes:

It should go without saying-but apparently, it needs saying nonetheless-that the strain of weirdly defensive, us-versus-them thinking that permeates Hoyt’s column this weekend helps nobody-least of all, the Times itself. On the contrary: such thinking represents all too well the protective, entitled, wagon-circling attitude that so many people resent about the Times-and about mainstream journalism more generally.