Really, LW, Cary's advice to you was great. And forget those commenters telling you that you don't have a porn addiction. There is nothing wrong with watching porn per se, but you yourself think you have a problem with consuming too much of it. Look, you use porn, you are ashamed of the volume of porn you consume and you hold such unreasonable visual expectations of women's bodies that you'd rather watch porn. So in short, you do have a problem and luckily it's not incurable.

I don't really have much to say except that once you realize what it is that causes you anxiety and once you are on track with stopping your addiction, you should look closely at your relationship with your girlfriend and her emotional and sexual needs. Examine the dynamics of your relationship. Why is it that you'd rather watch porn than discuss your sexual desires with your girlfriend? Do the two of you have trouble expressing intimacy?

You really need to do this once you've understood your own personal grapples. One thing you said that struck me was this: "Sometimes, I wish she would catch me, but she is such a good person, it would break her heart." Such a good person? Is that the only thing you have to say? It doesn't seem like you feel very strongly about her. It simply sounds like you see her as a nice, patient person and you don't want to hurt your feelings. It doesn't sound like this is a women you love, with whom you have been discussing marriage. And don't get married until your addition is resolved and until your girlfriend knows about your addiction. (That should seem obvious, right?)

But if you're critical, you risk your access. Forget about the friendships -- you often lose your sources if you offend them.

Jaynes mostly speaks of the insidious change of his own attitudes towards his subject but misses the most important point about the way journalism operates. Journalists shouldn't lose access to their sources or lose a good story just because they have the good sense to keep distance from their subjects. They shouldn't have to worry about offending their sources. The greatest issue at hand isn't the personal decision of journalists to restrain themselves from cozying up to their sources, it's the problem that journalists feel they will be shortchanged in the future if they don't mindlessly regurgitate what their sources tell them.

As another reader already noted, Paglia claims to support Obama and yet she spends about 2 pages in her 3-page article ripping Clinton apart, thinking that her abysmal ad hominem invective can pass for good writing. And she even manages to throw in more than one insult at her vocal critic Gloria Steinem, even though Steinem is completely irrelevant to the purported topic of this article (Obama's vp choice). Paglia, if you intend to use this column for self-promotion, you could at least try to be a shade subtler than the right-wing radio talk shows you complain about.

First there was that "Relax liberals, you've won" drivel and now there's this self-important, dismissive post from Koppelman, who, apparently, thinks that somebody in Congress having the guts to stand up for justice is not newsworthy. Ughh. Salon these days seems to be just a vehicle for the right-wing conspiracy by establishing division and apathy among liberals.

I do not put journalism on a pedestal. I simply see a distinction between op-eds and other journalistic articles. You may see journalism as a form of speech. But I reason that if journalism is merely the commodity of speech provided in the market, then media corporations still shouldn't falsely advertise their products as investigative journalism aimed at revealing facts as they do when in fact what they provide are simply deferential reports of what government officials say which fail to examine even factual errors of the claims. Furthermore, if we aren't to regard as inherently different from free speech, then we just shouldn't use the term journalism. After all, journalism supposedly has journalistic standards, which people supposedly learn at journalism schools. Maybe it's for the best, given the current condition of MSM outlets.

Nope - gov't shouldn't be subsidizing a media view. As I said before - if a media provider chooses to market a particular viewpoint because it's to his benefit, that's one thing. Gov't shouldn't be pressuring them, however.

So then by your standards would you say that you are absolutely fine with the notion that expressing false viewpoints, such as selling a war based on unfounded claims, is journalism? By your logic then editorials can be presented as serious journalism, which sets itself to establish the truth, as long as the media corporations benefit from it? This completely contradicts the purpose of journalism.

And furthermore, your point that the gov't should not subsidize media corporations to express a certain view is too simplistic. The government never directly subsidized media corporations to espouse pro-government stances because it's not that stupid. Instead, they achieved the same ends by insidiously pressuring journalists to write pro-war pieces by "threatened networks which were perceived to be too critical with cutting off access ". And, in the case of the military analyst program, subsidization was not necessary- they simply sent retired generals directly to the media corps.

I've been wondering the same thing (about the auto-pilot thing) too.

I don't know what to do! Maybe I should write Cary.

Oh no, villemar, don't you know? Cary's also an effete, elitist, baby-boomer hippie from decadent California. He'll just wax lyrical on how he has exactly the same problem.