The John Mariani saga so far, for those who haven’t been following along:

So a bunch of people including Sky Full of Bacon sniped at elite foodwriter John Mariani as he came to Chicago to tell us which of our restaurants met his high standards, some of them Twittering his antics as they happened though one of the best comments was this David Hammond LTH post; MenuPages summed up the controversy in a post temperately entitled “Why Does Everyone Hate John Mariani?”, which got so many comments attacking or defending him that first Mariani’s Esquire editor responded, and now Mariani himself has.

So basically Mariani’s rebuttal comes down to, blogs got no journalistic ethics.  Says the man whose defense is basically that even though he writes one of those hype-y magazine list things (“Best New Restaurants”), which would normally be the province of a critic, they gave him a different title so he wouldn’t be bound by the ethical requirements of a critic while still meeting the magazine’s minimum requirements for sensationalism, publicity and trendiness.

There, blogs, now you know what to aspire to as you clean your act up.