appetites

I read an interesting story recently at Many 2 Many, a collective blog (to which I was linked by Instapundit, actually.) The gist of the story was, I think, a general criticism of the media, or perhaps the NYT, using a specific example involving restaurant critics.
Apparently the new Zagat survey of restaurants in New York is out, and one of the most highly rated is a small, husband and wife-run place called the Grocery, which NYT critic William Grimes rated at one star in a recent review. This week, Grimes re-visited the restaurant, and pronounced that it does what it does pretty much perfectly.
He ends the article by noting that what it does is more modest than the food produced at, say, Le Bernardin. He compares the Grocery to a minor league baseball team; noting that even if a minor league team wins all of its games, it’s still not going to compete with the Yankees.
There is also an article by Florence Fabricant that discusses the Zagat guide more generally. Fabricant notes that Zagat is intended as a statistical survey of consumer opinion, that only 100 votes are needed to qualify a restaurant for the “top 50″ rating, and that there is no way to confirm that people commenting on a restaurant in the Zagat guide actually ate there.
The author of the Many 2 Many piece (Clay Shirky) seems to think that these articles are the NYT’s way of defending itself, or explaining how its reviewer could have given the Grocery a rating so different from the Zagat guide’s. Shirky argues that Fabricant’s piece is not so much criticism of the Zagat method, as an ineffective attempt at damage control.

This is not to say that Fabricant