Read the Whole Thing, as they say. I can’t excerpt it in any meaningful way. But the arguments he makes — that a lust for celebrity, a la Woodward and Bernstein; an obsession with fairness (or not being called unfair by the subjects of critical stories); and a failure to exercise the responsibility enshrined in the First Amendment — have all added up to a real risk of losing a source of critical oversight over government.
We have already seen in the broadcast media how, in some small radio markets, the stations are automated to the point where their responsibility to inform the local population of emergencies is compromised. Local TV stations slice up the news into meaninglessly small segments, fact-free and lurid. Newspapers, the physical medium, bought and sold by people, with bylines and editorial boards you can easily access, have failed to differentiate themselves, relying on wire services to fill a lot of their pages, and gutting the local information that their readers want and need.
