So! Bill Keller has a new piece for the New York Times Magazine. He writes, “I don’t intend this occasional essay to become the Editor’s Pulpit,” which got us excited, naturally, because it meant that that was exactly what he was about to do. And when Keller goes in to Editor’s Pulpit mode, it generally means he is going to take on his nemesis du jour, the Huffington Post. Fun all around.

Keller’s actual subjects are the worthy issues of journalistic openness and transparency, and he begins by comparing James O’Keefe and Julian Assange. (As a side note, his comparison reminds us a lot of a post we read a few weeks ago for The Atlantic Wire by Erik Hayden.)

The interesting thing here is that Keller was criticized after his first take down of the Huffington Post for his reply to Arianna Huffington‘s rebuttal, where he (in the words of Felix Salmon):

[V]iolated the first rule of blogging, and failed to link to the argument he was engaging. So when he talked about “the reaction” to his column, or “clueless commentary”, the lack of any link was a CYA move, giving him the opportunity to say “oh no, I didn’t mean you“.

In this latest piece, Keller fails to link again. He writes:

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Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” is stepping up to the plate in defending NPR. He writes for the Wall Street Journal on Thursday:

I can point out that the recent tempests over “perceived bias” have nothing to do with what NPR puts on the air. The facts show that NPR attracts a politically diverse audience of 33.7 million weekly listeners to its member stations on-air. In surveys by GfK MRI, most listeners consistently identify themselves as “middle of the road” or “conservative.”

As for James O’Keefe, the activist whose video prank led to NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller losing her job, Inskeep loftily recounts hearing of the story while he was reporting from Egypt. When he had dinner that night with the NPR Cairo bureau, they barely discussed the NPR news back home. Writes Inskeep:

I noticed a contrast between the news that NPR reports from the Arab world and the news NPR has lately made at home. Each news story revealed the values of the people reporting it… I congratulate Mr. O’Keefe for upholding his values: faith in the power of video to mislead.

Zing! NPR could have used some of Inskeep’s backbone when the O’Keefe story broke, before it fell over itself apologizing and getting rid of people. Now this latest defense might just be too late.