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That question also needs to be asked about the media. In these grim and foreboding times, our media have this year spent incredible amounts of time on a hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney, a bogus claim that the administration revealed Valerie Plame's identity as a C.I.A. "agent" -- actually a desk job in Virginia -- and is now going ballistic over a Congressman who sent raunchy e-mails to Congressional pages.

“ If knowledge of our government's deeds and words is indispensable to a free people, does it not follow that the quality of our government will be directly proportionate to the quality of journalism?” — Freeper gogeo

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The socialist/Marxist/liberal media is the most destructive, relentless, and ruthless enemy of this Republic.

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Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the press, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse. -Mark Twain

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"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague." - Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Orator --- 106-43 B.C.

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"How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity, that his intentions were good. - Letter to Henry Mills Alden, published in the Chicago Daily Tribune, November 11, 1906, pg. 3.

People who assume that it is their role merely to react to the information they are given, rather than to first read between the lines of what they are told and discern the truth, will always be the target of charlatans promoting panaceas. And such knaves have promoted supposed "objectivity" as the clothing of the perfectly naked King Journalism.
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . . It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
Journalism says journalism is objective - and few there be who dare ask, "Besides your own self-interested word, the proof of that is exactly what?" If you research history in the pages of journalism, you will find that, but for the advertisements, journalism is always criticism of the people and institutions upon whom/which we must depend. Other than journalism, of course . . .
The perspective of journalism is that the interests of journalism are identical with the public interest. The actual definition of the public interest is, of course, at any time the subject of the most vigorous political debate. And at this point in history - and at least since Vietnam - the Democratic Party has identified itself nearly unreservedly to the interest of journalism, becoming essentially an appendage of journalism.