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Without a doubt, journalists have fallen from grace and that "The Fourth Estate can no longer be viewed as "Guardians of democracy ~ Defenders Of The Public Interest".

In 1945, the Supreme Court, in a case called Associated Press v. U.S., wrote that "...the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public..? Yet, under the Clinton Administration (and despite laws specifically designed to prevent it) merger after merger took place until the actual number of corporations dominating most of every mass medium dropped from 23 media firms to 6 mega-media corporations by the Spring of 2000!

But even this number is deceiving ~ the power and influence of these mega-conglomerates is understated by counting them as 'six' because, in reality, these six are actually intertwined! They own stock in each other, they cooperate in joint media ventures, and among themselves they divide profits from some of the most widely viewed programs on television, cable and movies.

As foreseen by the Supreme Court in 1945, this consolidation of power and control has been to the detriment to us all as the media role shifted from ensuring democracy to undermining the function of true democracy.

Under this condensed, goal oriented management, our nation's "Guardians Of The Peoples Right to Know" have mutated into "opinion shapers" who present very specific information in a manner which meets a very specific agenda.

If you walk through the front door of Columbia School of Journalism, one of the first thing you would see is this paragraph, cast on a bronze plaque:

This paragraph is from an article written in 1904 by Joseph Pulitzer where he argued the need for a ethically trained and disciplined approach to journalism. Like the 1945 Supreme Court Justices, Pulitzer realized how very important certain standards are to the security of this nation.

the power and influence of these mega-conglomerates is understated by counting them as 'six' because, in reality, these six are actually intertwined! They own stock in each other, they cooperate in joint media ventures, and among themselves they divide profits from some of the most widely viewed programs on television, cable and movies.

I don't even consider it necessary to prove that "the media" have interlocking directorates or any such thing. It is enough that their output is public knowledge:

If outlet A is putting out the story that Plame was undercover, outlet B knows it.

We all know (and therefore outlet B knows) that Plame was not covert in any meaningful sense.

The mere fact that outlet B does not blow the whistle on outlet A is sufficient to show collusion.

But the Plame-Wilson tempest is scarcely unique in the genre; the political hit on Bush by CBS's touting of forgeries as "federal documents" is of precisely the same genre. How different, really, is the fatuousness of the Plame-Wilson "outing" story from the fatuousness ofo CBS' claims that the forgeries cannot be proven to be fraudulent, and that CBS didn't express a political agenda when it took the Kerry line that the thirty-year-old difference in Kerry's and Bush's war records was more important than Kerry's and Bush's recent political performances? And how different are those two examples from journalism's infamous call of Florida for Gore while many polls in the state were still open - followed by journalism's vociferous attack on FNC for being the first to call the election right? How different all of these from the systematic denigration, from the very start of Operation Iraqi Freedom to the present day, of the efforts of our military personnel in Iraq?
It's as plain as the nose on your face that "objective journalism" is a cabal which openly self-selects - you get to be considered an "objective journalist" by all the rest of the members so long, and only so long, as you do not question the objectivity of any other member of the cabal.
It's all founded on the premise that nothing matters but PR - that the virtual reality which is only what journalism reports is all that matters. Essentially, a BIG LIE technique . . . "Liberalism" is simply the political implication of journalism's commercial imperative to attract attention for advertisers.
It may not be possible to prove that in a court of law beyond all cavail - but what is absolutely certain IMHO is that it cannot be disproved - and that the burden of proof properly rests on those who perpetrate such violations of the First Amendment as the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. Is it not for this reason, if for no other, that we require a firm majority of courageous justices on SCOTUS? For it SCOTUS will not vindicates our right to freedom of speech and press on the Internet at all times, nothing is more certain than that the media borg will assimilate the country unopposed.