Martin Stabe must be on performance enhancing drugs – his posting levels are through the roof. It’s all good stuff, especially on the Richard Sambrook vs. Andrew Keen showdown at the Frontline. Keen’s new media vs. old media gamble is that infamy as the blogosphere’s contrarian punchbag will help sell his book. (Jeff Jarvis memorably called Keen’s bluff in this post.)

Anyway, as strategies go, it’s not exactly rope-a-dope, and in the rather unequal intellectual battle (given Keen’s flyweight thesis), Richard Sambrook appears to have KOed him. Take this exchange:

Keen had argued that journalists “should be more arrogant”.

“There’s a crisis of confidence in mainstream journalists,” Keen said. “They need to be more arrogant…”

… Sambrook disputed this view, saying that the real problem is that there isn’t enough humility or transparency in journalism.

“Yes, we do have expertise or skill, but we we’re not going to get the credit that may be conferred on that if we behave arrogantly or say ‘we know best’,” said Sambrook.

When Keen challenged Sambrook to offer an example where the BBC has been “really screwed up” or should have shown more humility, Sambrook mentioned the crisis that engulfed the BBC following Andrew Gilligan’s May 2003 Today programme report that the Blair government had, against the wishes of intelligence agencies, “sexed up” a dossier on the case for going to war in Iraq.

Yes, after walking into that one, Keen could sell advertising space on the soles of his shoes.

Still, I would though take issue with Sambrook‘s account of the Hutton Inquiry. Gilligan was sloppy and his story was wrong.

Police officers caught framing villains, don‘t get far with the defence – “But they were villains!” Journalists, similarly, should not be allowed to Gene Hunt their way out of trouble.

But that, as they say, is another story.