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“I mean that we should know better than to take things at face value. My cynicism about journalism and the Democratic Party is essentially total.”

I'm going to take that as a “why bother” then. How do you feel about the Republican party?

I'll give you a hint on how I feel: No better or worse than the Dems (as a party). Some individuals in both parties are what I want in a congress critter, but not very freaking many. That would be why I want them to get the idea that we are watching them. Like hawks!

What good does it do to watch them do exactly what you already know, and they already know that you know, that they are gonna do?
That sounds like a counsel of utter cynicism and disengagement in politics - exactly what the pols want. But that is not my meaning. My point is that journalism has succeeded in wildly overhyping its own importance. Journalism styles itself "the press" - of which it is I admit a component, tho not the only component - but that omits some important points:

Journalism self-defines itself as being objective and - see for example "The National Press Club" - self-defines itself as constituting "the press" of the First Amendment. But the First Amendment plainly restricts the government from requiring "the press" to be objective - and if the government certifies that journalism is objective, and constitutes "the press," the government is thereby violating the First Amendment.

Journalism as we and our grandparents have always known it - tracing back a century and a half, to the middle of the Nineteenth Century - is a creature of the telegraph and the Associated Press. It was only with the advent of the AP that "newspapers" actually began to rely on publishing news which the general public could not know until the newspaper printed it. We take such a steady stream news from distant locales as being the central, defining characteristic of the newspaper, the very heart of its business model - but news in that sense scarcely even existed at the time of the ratification of the First Amendment. The printer didn't have sources to which the general public could not be privy, and consequently there was no point to operating on a short deadline to try to put out the word to the public before they learned the news from other sources. Most newspapers were not dailies but weeklies - and some had no deadline at all, and just went to press when the printer thought he was good and ready.

The business model of pre-Associated Press newspapers was not that of the AP newspapers but was much more like that of The Nation or National Review - they depended for their audience not on their news gathering/dissemination but on their interpretation of events - the perspective of the printer. They made no pretense to objectivity; they couldn't do so with a straight face, and their competitors were not about to accept any such imposture without engaging in the heaviest ridicule of which they were capable. They were not independent of the political parties; indeed I would argue that the paper which Jefferson sponsored to attack the politics of Alexander Hamilton - and to respond to the attacks by the paper Hamilton himself sponsored for reciprocal purposes - was possibly the embryo of the Democratic Party.

The rules which journalism proposes as constituting their objectivity do not reflect the public interest but rather what interests the public - and that is quite a different matter. "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper" is a counsel of superficiality, "'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man'" is a counsel of unrepresentativeness, and "If it bleeds, it leads" is a counsel of negativity. IOW, there is always news, and the news is always bad, and the news is always important even if it doesn't really signify anything enduringly true . In that sense, what defines newspapers is not the public interest, it is actually radicalism. Consequently there is no reason for so-called "objective journalism" to be independent of the Democratic Party, nor vice versa. In fact there is a powerful symbiosis between the two, which explains why there is a revolving door between journalism and Democratic, but not Republican, political operatives.

In this article, Thomas Sowell is merely arguing that one of the defining characteristics of journalism - its rush to judgement - is not in the public interest. No matter how useful journalists find it for the purpose of interesting the public.
Bad "News" (Thomas Sowell) Townhall.com ^ | August 5, 2008 | Thomas Sowell