Breaking the Jonathan Franzen / Oprah Winfrey story on Monday, and following on Wednesday with the cover photo of Freedom proving our first report, led to one of those interesting and rather revealing lessons in modern media yesterday.

I was forced to reconsider my years-long criticisms of the New York Times, for example, for such things as only using sources from the big houses, when Times reporter Julie Bosman ran the story on Oprah choosing Franzen for her club and cited as her source none other than … MobyLives. And plenty of other places gave MobyLives credit for the scoop, too, from major mainstream newspapers (see this Christian Science Monitor report and this New York Observer story) to important industry blogs (see this Publishers Lunch report and this GalleyCat report).

But that only made it all the more depressing to see how many major mainstream media outlets — in fact, the majority by far — are STILL unwilling to credit non-mainstream reporters with reporting the news, no matter what. It also makes you wonder about sloppy reporting, if they’re not even aware of what leading book business reporters seemed to be in agreement on.

The Associated Press, for example, which ran a brief story in mid afternoon Thursday that said three booksellers had confirmed the story we first reported Monday (the AP kept elaborating on the story throughout the day). It seemed strange to us, especially after the Times pick-up, that the AP did not cite MobyLives’ original report, nor — especially — our follow-up on Wednesday, in which we included the ultimate evidence, a photo of Franzen’s book with the Oprah sticker on it (which the Times also picked up). The AP seemed to be putting itself through contortions to ignore us. It just made the case that, as one industry insider confided to me, “the AP is horrendous in their institutional attitude/policy that news never comes from anywhere else and always originates with them.”

Stranger still, though, was how many major news outlets were then ready to give the AP credit for the “scoop” — such as this Atlantic Monthly report or this NPR report. Even more distressing were the places that gave the AP credit for the scoop even though they knew better — because we’d sent them our photo the day before the AP story ran. Publishers Weekly, in this report, for example. Or the Washington Post, which in its report actually linked to an old MobyLives column about the original Franzen-Winfrey dust-up … but somehow missed our scoop about their newest teaming-up, which appeared on the very same website’s homepage. And it was particularly disturbing when one of our very favorite news sources, the Los Angeles Times in its book blog Jacket Copy, singled out Moby in its report to suggest we’d used a doctored photograph.

On a similar note, not a single American reporter bothered to check with us on our story or its sourcing, nor for the provenance of the photo. (It came from the manager of a chain bookstore, by the way, who risked their job in contacting us. But they said they were greatly upset by the cynicism of it all after Franzen’s previous Oprah run-in. It meant that much to them, which speaks to the importance of this story to me.)

However, several British reporters did contact us, most notably Richard Lea, for this thoughtful column in The Guardian, and Christine Kearney, for her detailed wire report for Reuters. We’re not the only people they talked to, either. They each cite several industry sources to discus the meaning and impact of these shenanigans on the industry and culture — they did some, you know, whatchamacalit … reporting. Thus, none of the American reports match these reports for their in-depth consideration of the issues involved — such as, is an embargo a good thing for the reader? — nor do they come close at all to approaching the cynicism inherent in the Franzen-Winfrey match-up.

That match-up made in marketing heaven still seems to Moby like the book business at its worst. As for what this all says about cultural reportage, I’m thinking of moving to London.