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I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but I have heard that if a Navy captain ever runs a ship aground, his/her career is over. No parsing of words, deflection of blame, or room for spin. It happens on your ship, you're done.
That level of responsibility obviously doesn't prevail in the larger military, as the Tillman/Lynch travesties make plain. But imagine if such consequences awaited the purveyors of the stenography Glenn has been hammering lately. Adam Nagourney, Judy Miller, Steno Sue Schmidt and a bunch of their prominent pals would be where they belong -- sniffing out city council intrigues for the Poughkeepsie Journal. And the fear of such a fate would focus the minds of other reporters wonderfully.
I don't know if there ever was an effective internal feedback loop to weed out these willful fools. But I do know that the closest thing to a functional conscience now is us.
Keep throwing the high, hard ones, Glenn.
