Last week we brought you the highlights of a hard-hitting 4,700-word take-down of The Washington Post that portrayed a paper rife with internal friction and struggling to find its identity. Now the Post is turning the cannons back on the author, The New Republic's media reporter Gabriel Sherman.

• Exaggerating, 'Lazy' Piece "Every few years," snipes Washington Post board chairman Donald Graham in a letter to The New Republic, "a writer for The New Republic or some similar magazine comes forward to announce the collapse of standards and journalism at The Washington Post. Having read these stories for 40 years," he continues, winding up for another swing, "I found Gabriel Sherman's piece ... particularly lazy." Graham says Sherman is attempting to make a "mountain" out of the old salon dinner issue in which Graham fails to find "even a respectable-sized molehill." He suggests those wishing to "join Mr. Sherman and judge the post ... read this morning's paper," as "the answer to such articles is the same as always: 365 days of good newspapers and web journalism which the staff of the Post will produce in 2010."

• Buried Info That the Post Is Actually Doing Well "In fact," adds Washington Post blogger Joel Achenbach, "the writer finally gets around to mentioning in the third-to-last paragraph that multiple sources say The Post turned a profit in the fourth quarter of 2009. Oh, and The Post continues to break big stories 'with impressive regularity.'"

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Heather Horn