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We owe what's left of our battered democracy to you and some other bloggers who are now the site of oversight and accountability after the White House, Congress, and the press have checked out. I'm not saying every journalist or reporter is corrupted, but rather that the interests driving the war on terror, however ineptly conceived of and fought, would not be possible without considerable numbers of the Washington D.C. establishment rewriting all kinds of conventional understandings of words like "conflict of interest."
I suspect that many in the press know they are responsible for not investigating all kinds of things, but that they've told themselves "were at war," so we have to "change the rules" of journalism. Isn't this really the heart of the matter--the rhetoric of the war on terror which says "everything has changed, so our democracy must change," which means we can't have oversight, accountability, anymore, because those are just what have to be sacrified to defeat our enemy.
This is not an excuse, by the way, for everyone not doing their jobs or doing them so poorly as to lead to bizarre situations like Tim Russert saying he worked as a journalist by starting with the assumption that "everything was off the record," and then went back and asked interviewees to "go public" on certain points.
It seems that journalists decided that they had to go to war also, even though that isn't their function, or they would be "aiding and abetting."
Quite a discouraging symptom of how easily our political system can implode given the right circumstances. But the worst thing about it, the absolute worst, is the refusal of accountability, when mistakes are pointed out. It's George W. Bush writ large, as if the Zeitgeist is now, "don't ever admit you made a mistake or you will be empowering your enemy," and in this case, the enemy is the public interest.
