So says a former network talking-head and current associate professor of journalism at the University of Georgia.

Whoa. Let’s back up. The double-standard here has me bent almost in two. But the kink is far from rare.

WBT’s Keith Larson reminded me just this morning of Jim Morrill’s absurd lede in the Uptown paper of record on Sunday:

A gold mine for talk radio and blogs has become a minefield for Mecklenburg County’s race relations and Democratic Party.

So only talk radio and blogs have featured intensive, audience-capturing coverage of Nick Mackey and his associated issues? No, clearly that is not the case, not with all the front-page coverage of the Mackey story in Morrill’s own paper.

So it must be that, by definition, when mainstream outlets like the Observer cover a scandal it is a public service. “Checking all candidates is our duty to you,” Rick Thames declared. But when alt-media does the same thing — and even advance the story — then it is sensationalized pandering?

The motives of the Professional Journalist, well, they are beyond reproach, but the “citizen journalist” — who knows what they are up to? Better check, or at least question.

This brings us to this David Hazinski guy, a former NBC correspondent, and his column Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky, which has already been nuked from space by an ace technology writer and by a leader in the citizen journalism field.

Still, the mind-blowing stuff Hazinski advances — “The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend” — is merely the distilled, refined arrogance reflected in Morrill’s off-hand assertion that alt-media is wallowing in the Mackey story, but McClatchy is above all that.

I really wish former Charlotte city councilman and Mackey backer Harold Cogdell could deliver on his proposed boycott of Observer advertisers — we’d find out a great deal about McClatchy’s motives then. Of course, economic boycotts never work, but as an ill-informed and out-of-control citizen journalist, how am I supposed to know that?