We now know that the media will circle the wagons and protect their own. So now that many news stories are ABOUT the media, who will be watching them? Who will be scrutinizing them? We will. And they don't like it one damn bit. It's as simple as that.

Reminds me of the Dilbert where Dogbert teaches a class on trust in which he has everyone write him a blank check.

"The lesson is, trust is a very good thing for other people to have."

Might as well check out Jeff Jarvis' write-up on this exact same topic as well.

open source journalism, or no journalism that is their choice. The old media no longer owns monopoly access to the public microphone.

""sunlight is the best disinfectant" and all that -- is now being applied to them, and they're whining about it like truculent children."

Actually they're screaming about it like Vampires dumped out of a van on Miami Beach at Twelve Noon.

Its fun watching them come to grips with the fact that they aren't a priesthood with exclusive access to the sacred first ammendment.
It also exposes the sham that is the "profession" of journalism.

Rather, Raines and Jordan.....sounds like three perfect faces for Mount Blogsmore -anyone got a mountain handy?

Where has Amish been? i miss him.

They think of themselves as “professionals” now. One necessary characteristic of a profession is that its members develop ethical standards and enforce them among themselves. They try to capture the benefits of a profession, namely the deference accorded to practitioners of a learned art not easily comprehensible by the masses, without bearing the burden of creating a binding ethical code and punishing members who violate it.

I don't know. I am not too concerned about what goes on in the background so long as the story presented is true.

With too much transparency, there will be too much questioning what was said at the water cooler at Fox News instead of the accuracy of the report as its aired.

I think if anything, we need more transparency from the media than anywhere else. They are the primary source of information by which everything else is judged. It's essential that we know we are getting unbiased and complete truth. ...or at least that we know enough about them to properly "consider the source."

BTW: Is anyone else as sick as I am seeing the word "insurgents" applied to people who blow up worshipers and kill true innocents like Margaret Hassan? Is it time; is it possible to say "we're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more!" ...And refuse to accept news from any source that gives "support" to those guys by not calling them what they really are.. I believe that if the media would simply start referring to them as the "terrorists" that they are, it would make real difference in the psychological war they are fighting.

Just found this:

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” John F. Kennedy

Well, the press/media/juggernaut does fear Americans. Fear of the average American underlies every single newspaper article, tv news broadcast, and editorial downplaying the achievements of any effort anywhere in the world that has Americans involved. The war against Islamic terrorists has so far resulted in not one but two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, that had both been written off as hopeless by the Learned Ones in the media and university system being transformed into democracies. But what has the media's focus been so far? Depressed, despairing (the Learned Ones call it "cautionary") accounts of death and destruction, that treated as fools and children the people who walked over mountains in Afghanistan and walked through mortar fire in Iraq to vote for their own government. If the articles and columns and stories even bothered to mention the voting at all.

But there is more. After the tsunami in Southeast Asia Americans immediately began collecting money and sending aid, including one of our major battleships (while we are in the middle of a war, mind you) because it had a water-plant and hospital on board, and what did we get? Reports that the Concerned Ones were worried about all those rude American Marines stomping all over the delicate and fragile Muslim culture, moanings about how we weren't "giving enough" because we didn't carve up our own children and send them over as food or drown ourselves in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of drowned people, or hell I don't know what they wanted us to do.

And so on. Americans, to Our Betters in the Media, are all uncouth rednecks who think Jebus wants to set the Gays on fire with his Holy Laser Beams and who fuck our cousins in our trailer parks when we aren't lynching African-American Lesbian ballet dancers in the public square. The only people who are excepted from this lake of tar are the people who live in New York City/San Francisco/Los Angeles/Seattle/Portland, and every member of an Officially Recognized Oppressed By the White Man minority (in other words, no Asians or Cubans allowed), as long as they remember to keep their place.

"A profession is a conspiracy against the laity" -- Oscar Wilde.

Who will screw the screwers?

AT-

You're absolutely correct. But another aspect for a profession is standardized tests for its members.

The Bar. Series 7. Real Estate Exams. Actuarial tests. Steps 1, 2 & 3 for doctors.

What do journos have? Undergrad degrees?

I mean, does that make every English major a professional english-ist.

HA!!!

The moonbats are raging against this also. They may refuse to admit the bias that's right in front of their faces, but they'll be the last to push the media toward transparency. They know what they're losing.

Laugh if you will Birkel, but it qualifies them to drive an English truck.
And he who drives the English truck...gets all the free English he wants.

I find it completely amazing that in the defense of themselves, the media resorts to the exact same tactics as the evildoers they have been "exposing" all these years. Good God, you'd think that after ruining so many people publicly that Gunga Dan would know what not to do instead of flailing around and stonewalling as this turned into a circus. To me, this shows a fundemental lack of judgement that is the hallmark of Liberalism along with cowardice and dishonesty .

I agree, we need more transparency in the media. We should start by requiring Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and Monica Crowley to wear only transparent clothing while on TV.

"but they'll be the last to push the media toward transparency. They know what they're losing."

Uhhh, they wouldn't be losing any more than the right. The various outlets are biased one way or the other (sometimes both). The right has bias in the media also. Then there's the crap that happens not for political bias so much as for sensationalist reasons and ratings. Then ofcoarse the laziness that has set in to these "professionals" simply because there wasn't any real sort of competition to keep them going. I started commenting on this subject on another blog and a point was made that the MSM will probably not go away, they'll adapt. They're too greedy to go away. Hopefully it will be a good adaptation though. Maybe they'll pay more attention to there web presence and link sources, post full transcripts, have open debate areas; ya know all the stuff that makes blogs great.

Has anyone else been surprised how strongly the OM/MSM has reacted to this? It's almost as if they were coordinated. It's probably more that they're feeling individually attacked since they feel they are part of what the bloggers are denigrating. It's interesting though.

The Old Media reaction is unsurprising, if you think of their practitioners not as "professionals" but as acolytes or priests. Or royalty. The Church and the European aristocratic establishment feared the wide dissemination of printing press technology as it had the awful potential to loosen or even sever the dependence of the peasant/serf class upon them for an information data set designed to reinforce an existing world view in which they were the favored and privileged few. Today's Old Media "practitioners" are merely reprising the old story of elites fighting technology that could rip power from their hands and impose a meritocracy on the assembly and dissemination of information. But like the Siberian mastodon, they have been frozen by the storm so quickly they have no inkling that they are already dead. It's just so much random nerve conduction that keeps the body moving and ice that keeps the body from evidencing any outward decay.

"They cry ‘Truth’, ‘Truth’ ‘Truth’, and tell ‘lies’, ‘lies’, ‘lies’".

Augustine