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Among other things, though, the style of reporting changed from the "inverted pyramid" of who, what, when, where, why to an "engaging" personal style that always began with an anecdote or story (see any stupid column on any of last night's basketball games, and see how long it takes you to find out what the score was!!)

LOL! I made an extremely sarcastic comment about that very thing last night (it was a Social Security thread).

I've been noticing something in two of my primary focuses on FR: federal judges and taxes. The MSM always presents "a ruling by a federal judge" as though it was handed down from the Mount. I've also noticed that the MSM is completely incurious about taxation. They present taxes as "a done deal", and rarely, if ever, attempt to foment questions about the legitimacy of ANY taxation scheme. Along similar lines, educational institutions could easily cast a harsh light on the subject of taxation, but occupy themselves with more important issues, like "creative writing" and the like.

Having dealt with the media on a local level, I think the following is true:

1) Very few true journalists exist that have either the ability or the will to legitimately investigate the facts of stories and often depend on hand fed info from their favorite sources which, given the political leaning of most of those in journalism, is slanted to the liberal side.

2) There is a lack of professionalism in much of the management level in journalism that views media either as a propaganda opportunity to slant the stories that reporters turn in or entertainment and so focuses on titillation.

3) Conservatives gripe about the status of journalism but do very little about creating competition to the MSM in the current arena. Thank goodness for FOX News and blogs.

4) The tax regulations at ALL levels are so convoluted and so difficult to understand and most taxpayers don't take the time or have the ability to understand the systems so either fall for "simple fixes" from whoever is running for office or just pay and gripe. Given that most government bureaucracies are more liberal, the MSM is never going to challenge them even if they do actually take the time to investigate and report on the topics. As far as educational institutions and teaching about taxes, I've given classes on taxes in public schools, and very few of the teachers have a clue. The public education system is in itself one of the most inefficient spending entities for taxes and the four most dangerous words in the system are "It's for the kids." They justify any lack of accountability with those words.