The vitriol spewed about bloggers in this month's cover article for Forbes Magazine, entitled Attack of the Blogs, is so biased that after a few reads, it seems like the blatant conflations of truth and fiction must be willful. The article claims that blogs as a whole exist to smear companies and people, and uses poorly reported anecdotes to back up its thesis. Gelf envisions Forbes editors sitting around discussing ways to improve online readership and hitting upon a strategy: Publish a (free) story that pisses off bloggers so much that they feel compelled to complain, and in doing so, direct their streams of readers to the Forbes site. Indeed, a similar strategy of angering listeners has made Rush Limbaugh a must-hear for many of the country's liberals. Gelf is more than happy to play along.

The article's author, Daniel Lyons, has been on the technology beat for Forbes for seven years and was writing about computers well before the advent of the World Wide Web. So it's unlikely that he was manipulated by concerned companies into concocting this travesty of an article. He must understand that most bloggers and message-board posters are not company stooges paid to Astroturf smear campaigns. But that's what he implies time and time again, when he's not accusing other online publishers of being corrupt and lazy. "But if blogging is journalism," he writes, "then some of its practitioners seem to have learned the trade from Jayson Blair."

Here's the vital difference. Unlike journalists, most bloggers don't pretend to be unbiased and are upfront about their conclusions. Sure, there are a few bad apples, but that's the case in every form of writing, including journalism. (Gelf also thinks it is a fool's game for journalists to leave obvious conclusions unsaid for fear of appearing prejudiced. It's one thing to fail to report a story fully. It's quite another to do so because of a bias and then intentionally fail to connect the dots to reveal that bias, or to try to "balance" a story with a bullshit quote.)

Lyons himself is guilty of incomplete reporting. He writes about the harassment that John Hinderaker, who runs the conservative blog Powerline, endured after he published a missive telling left-wing blogs to back off about Jeff Gannon."…his blog brethren went on the assault," writes Lyons, "publishing his phone number at work and prompting a deluge of harassing phone calls and e-mails." As World O'Crap notes, the blog with the most prominent placement of Hinderaker's phone number is his own.

He also airs the complaints of Kryptonite's general manager, whose business was severely damaged after blogs spread an easy way to break its signature lock with a Bic pen. (See Engadget for a tutorial.) Lyons write that there is no evidence for blogs' claims that Kryptonite knew about the problem and covered it up, but that's not true. The Bic trick has been known in bike circles for over a decade (BikeBiz.co.uk), and it seems a stretch that no one at Kryptonite would have heard of it.

And contrary to Lyons's assertions, it is the bloggers and posters who have endured the worst in terms of invasion of privacy. While the article sympathetically quotes a businessman targeted by an angry blogger ("The lawyer for Yahoo basically told me, 'Ha-ha-ha, you're screwed,' "), Yahoo has recently made a habit of outing anonymous posters who thought they were protected by the company's privacy policy. But Lyons makes no mention of Shi Tao (Christian Science Monitor) and Clifton Swiger (Boing Boing); after Yahoo gave up their personal data, Tao was jailed and Swiger was fired.

In the end, Lyons advises companies to pay off bloggers and sue those who complain about them. Overall, it's an aggressive tone from a normally stodgy magazine. But like a newbie blogger reaching out for readers, Forbes has decided to throw a few pieces of meat to the pajama-clad wolves.