That is probably optimistic... but I don't get the sense that the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, or the Economist face quite as much economic pressure as the various news papers. Granted, they never had the circulation of the newspapers... but that is part of their advantage.

But we also need some new blood to shake up the media establishment--a few Barack Obama types to wake up the baby boomer senior editors who have gotten too comfortable with business as usual.

Cheney et. al. thought they could get away with cliff-notes Machiavellianism. Fox's 24 is not the best guide to The Prince or The Discourses.

To be frank, I support Obama partially because he has read Machiavelli, and digested him partially in Niebuhr's company.

Newspapers and reporters are disappearing faster than ice caps and polar bears. Information is an essential foundation of democracy. Journalism can’t be left entirely to the private sector. Some public support is necessary.

The government can't pay for journalism either, because then it's too tempting to turn it into propaganda.

There are plenty of baby boomers like me who are doing their best to contribute to progress, to do their job well.

I feel that people like stuff printed on paper for longer reading, if not for news headlines. I also feel that we don't need reporters from 100 national dailies all covering the same events, or press conferences. There's some kind of big consolidation that needs to happen.

Good writing and good reporting has value, so it will be preserved somehow, somewhere.

The challenge facing journalists is to figure out what medium a medium is good for and to apply the maxim value-add to that medium. Take the story of the US Airways plane that went down in the Hudson River.

If you want incredible images, turn on your TV. You'll get the images but the morons talking will say the same thing every five minutes, on a loop.

If you want just to know that it is happening, check your RSS feed from the online news source or listen to a radio station that interrupts programming every 30 minutes for news.

If you want an instant opinion on the plane, the FAA, or the aquatic life of the Hudson, read a blog.

If, however, you want thoughtful analysis of why and how this happened, a character study of the crew, and a detailed description of aircraft's design, glide ratio, etc, pick up print.

The Atlantic Magazine (yes, I subscribe) makes me smarter than the instant opinion junkies. And that's what print should be selling: smarts.

Advantage: ed.

Mary Matalin: There was so much to do that was more important than—I mean, looking back, the national-unity thing is important, but it was way more important to re-structure the intelligence communities, way more important to harden targets. Know what I mean? It was all hands on deck. We were working on other shit. Everyone’s pulverized and beat, and there’s 24 hours in a day, so woulda, coulda, shoulda, but, you know, there was no office to do “feel-good” stuff.

I just don't even know what to say to that.

You’re absolutely right.

That's why corporate journalists rarely tread on their employers' interests. And in any case, reporters, particularly investigative reporters, are going extinct.

Our police and judiciary are still largely in the public sector. It’s a constant struggle, but we have developed mechanisms that seek to keep them impartial.

Most of Dan Bartlett's included quotes make him seem somewhat more sensible than his colleagues, but his closing statement about how all of Bush's unpopularity and failures can be traced to the fact that WMDs weren't found in Iraq is just mind-boggling. There would be fewer "Bush lied. People died," posters around, sure, but given the track record of what actually happened, how can he think they would have handled the occupation any better just because a bunker full of nerve gas or a few scientists actively working on nuclear weapons development had actually been there to find?

But the Bush administration's blatant attempts to co-opt NPR, the US Attorneys, and other purportedly non-partisan government operations should make us all very wary of depending on NPR alone to be the guardian of liberty that Jefferson hoped a free press would be. If journalism can't exist without public support, then journalism is doomed.

What work? Sounds like they read Bush's Brain and Conservatives Without Conscience and just took notes.

Is there anything in that article that we haven't known for like 6 years? Gosh, maybe if the media had done their jobs eight years ago, when Cheney was in the process of moving into the intellectual vacuum surrounding George Bush, we could have, you know, all voted for someone else.

I mean, seriously? We're going to give Vanity Fair credit for only now noticing what's been obvious for years? Grats on retarded, I guess.

I expect that publications like The Atlantic and Vanity Fair will come out okay in the end, as will the better newspapers. Their strong brands and the larger audience that the web gives them will help offset the reduction in ad revenue per reader. But the smaller local and regional publications are in serious trouble. They don't have the resources to compete on the national and world beats, and local and niche news are exactly the areas where bloggers can shine. A citizen who cares about off-leash dog parks (or bike paths, or transit, or whatever) can cover that issue as well or better than a reporter who has to divide time among several city beats.

So, regardless of whether this particular VF piece is amazing or just stating the obvious (I think it's some of both), it's a valid question. It's hard to see at this time, for me, how a web-only model would pay for multi-part, international investigative work. But I'm no internet visionary, and maybe someone will figure it out.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/

A few weeks later, Attorney General Ashcroft held one of his dramatic press conferences, in which he announced a complaint being filed against Lindh. He was asked if Lindh had been permitted counsel. And he said, in effect, To our knowledge, the subject has not requested counsel. That was just completely false. About two weeks after that he held another press conference, because this was the first high-profile terrorism prosecution after 9/11. And in that press conference he was asked again about Lindh’s rights, and he said that Lindh’s rights had been carefully, scrupulously guarded, which, again, was contrary to the facts, and contrary to the picture that was circulating around the world of Lindh blindfolded, gagged, naked, bound to a board.
Ms Radack is never resigned because she disagreed she was essentially fired a la Valerie Plaume.

One question I'll echo from some of the previous commenters, though, is why more of this wasn't more widely known. I feel like the mainstream media (including print) really did a poor job of covering what was going on in the Bush administration and the government in general, from 9/11 until perhaps Katrina. My guess is that this had to do with some willingness to go along with the administration in time of war, but I'd like to understand it better. Was Cheney's office eavesdropping on their email, too? Were they just really good at spinning the media somehow? (How?)

As Bob Somerby has exhaustively detailed, the media's very unskeptical coverage of Bush started at the beginning of the 2000 campaign, all the way back in 1999 really. And at the same time they were nitpicking Gore to death: Love Story, Love Canal, brown suits, inventing the Internet, etc. So this wasn't a post-9/11 thing at all.

I don't know what exactly it is with them, but they decided from the beginning that they didn't like Clinton, and that was doubled and redoubled after l'affaire Lewinsky. (Sally Quinn's infamous "Village" piece gives the best feel for this. Among other goodies, it's the original source of the equally infamous Broder quote, "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place." He obviously could have said the same thing about Bush, but never did, of course.)

By contrast, even now, Washington's media elites are saying that OK, Bush sucked already, but we shouldn't investigate exactly what he did too closely; it's time to move forward.

I can't say why this is so, because I can't open the brains of David Broder, Fred Hiatt, Ruth Marcus, Sally Quinn, and all the rest, and see what's inside. All I can do is report that the media's pro-Bush bias has been there for a decade now.

"The day of the recount"??

Which day was this, Mark? When did this "recount" happen?

Ummm, it didn't. You know why? Because your side blocked it by every means possible - including the infamous "Brooks Brothers Riot" conducted by a bunch of GOP staffers flown to Florida specifically for the occasion.

If "civility was a heartfelt, well-intended objective," that incident, just to pick one, would never have happened.

So he was nice to Rodriguez' mother. BFD. Adolf Hitler was nice to some actual human beings, too, but nobody would dream of using that as a basis for describing Hitler as a "caring human being."

Bush is nowhere near the monster Hitler was, of course. But the point is that persons far worse than GWB have managed the trick of being nice to a stranger or two - so that doesn't prove anything.

Good Lord, who are these brain-dead people? Why have they not, even now, woken up?

but:

1. it's seven years too late
2. it's one critical assessment in what remains a sea of slobbering acceptance shading into admiration