Maybe the worst thing about this practice is how it enables extremists and excludes serious discussions-- if the truth is always in the middle, and simply repeating the claims of both sides is how a journalist needs to treat any dispute, the only way to keep Holocaust deniers and crazy conspiracy theorists from spreading their nonsense is just to refuse to report on those issues.

It seems this is done by editing and gatekeeping-- simply label some people, groups and opinions as 'too far from the mainstream' to be given a voice. But once you put labels like that on people, you inevitably make both obvious kinds of error: Ann Coulter is (despite being a lying lunatic) categorized as admissible, while Noam Chomsky (despite being a serious scholar) is inadmissable. Attacks on the science of global warming are reported seriously, while criticism of the U.S. health care system (by Michael Moore, for instance) gets labeled extremist (and when it's treated at all, it's treated in straw man guise, with heavy emphasis on fear of 'socialism').

The press becomes an instrument of power and privilege instead of a source of information that might actually serve the public interest, and it's freed to do so by the idea that there is no responsibility to actually seek and report accurate information.

The Corporate Media is much like the old Soviet media, or the media in any dictatorship; presenting a fantasy view of the world, apparently oblivious that increasing numbers of people beleive what they are being told is all propaganda. A large percentage of Americans realize that American foriegn policy is terrorizing the world, not saving it, as the Corporate media and the Government would have you believe. What that percentage is, I don't know. But I would think it is at least equal to the 22% or so that still believes in George Bush.

What's funny is that right wingers complain about media like the New York Times for printing articles which criticize or expose misdeeds by the American Goverment overseas, calling them biased for doing so. In reality, the bias is in the other direction. They print .01% of what's really going on, and don't print 99.99% of it.

Does anything speak more clearly about the vapidness of the mass media then the wall to wall coverage of Michael Jackson's death in the network news shows, day after day. One would think the President had been assassinated. Meanwhile, wars in Iraq and Afaganistan go on, not to mention thousands of other misdeeds by the American Goverment, all with minimal coverage.

The warmongers that run the U.S. are on the wrong side of history. Their day will come. And it is being helped along by bloggers and alternative media like Salon, Alternet, and the Huffington Post. And by people that are the truly great Americans, people like Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, and Dan Froomkin. Not people like George Bush and Robert McNarmra. Those are the real traitors to America.

It is not possible that Greenwald could be correct that Huffington Post hired Froomkin.

For one thing, Salon is New Media. New Media does not report things, they steal from Old Media (or so we are told).

For another, I did not read this in my morning copy of the Washington Post, so again it can not be true. (I did read about the Michael Jackson funeral, so he must indeed be dead. I was unsure of that since I found out about his death online, and therefore it was an unreliable report.)

Finally, I have not seen Froomkin on either "Morning Joe" or "Fox & Friends", so until that happens this is simply a rumor spread around by another unreliable New Media type.

has become mildly more critical of Obama in recent months; its screaming, red headline today: "White House May Cave on Public Option")

Good. Something like that should be in screaming red headlines.

With luck, soon they'll have screaming red headlines for items like, "Obama Continues Bush Detention Policies," or "Obama Expands Executive Secrecy."

The more high-profile criticism of Obama we see from the left, the more the Overton Window gets dragged back from the far right.

1. I think you're ascribing a rather pleasing reason for the death throes of establishment media. I would like to think that it has to do with the continuing decline in journalistic ethics, but it seemingly has more to do with its inability to switch over to an advertising model that generates enough money on line. As fewer people of the target demographic buy the print version, the big rags have to rely primarily on internet ad revenue, which no one seems to have figured out how to sell in the ways that made last generations newspaper owners fantastically rich.

2. It bothers me that you lump all of "establishment" journalists together, as if the only thing that would free a journalist from such a label is the criticism of other journalists. That's true in some regards, perhaps. But I read the New York Times every day. I'd say its about 80% crap journalism, and I've written several articles about just how bad it is. But there are journalists out there who are doing great work on both the local and establishment level and they really don't concern themselves with critiquing the White House Press Corps. At no point can we pretend that we don't rely on the mainstream media for a goodly amount of our information, and that we work in symbiosis with the "good" reporters out there and the great bloggers and independent journalists. Froomkin after all, was an establishment journalist, who only stopped working for the establishment because he was fired.

I think the worst thing that good "establishment" journalists can hear are blanket condemnations of their work, along with the work of bad "establishment" journalists. It must be hard enough holding your head above the tide of shit that is the business end of the news business, but hearing that the good work you've done is not appreciated or distinguished from the rest must be somewhat disheartening.

That's not to say that this isn't good news.