Yeah! I got a response! Admittedly, it's just Joel, but it's something!!! As such, I feel I've started a discourse. Let's get to it.

"I feel the same has happened with the president. There's no trust between the office and the press any longer, thus the doors are closed and its nearly impossible to report stuff.

And about your "golden days" of journalism, how golden were they? So great that the press never revealed the extent to which FDR was crippled? So honest that they consistantly looked the other way as women slipped out of the Kennedy White House?

And I don't think any secret government agents have tried to shutdown your blog that's been updated twice in the last 6 months."

Yes. I think those years were and are still golden. And it's because I think back then those kinds of reports were considered bullcrap. Did women having sex with Kennedy make him a bad president? Would we have made it to the moon without the guy? Maybe. Who can say? But it may well have taken far longer. If Kennedy had sex with fewer women, would it have taken us less time to make it too the moon?

Would there be any chance of FDR being elected today? No. FDR would NEVER have been elected in this America. Because you'd have 3000 "watchdogs" paying zero attention to his ideas and record and paying complete attention to his ability to walk.

It's banality today. Its noise and wind blowing from your television set. I concede that Tim Russert was a poor pick to exemplify, but I believe the notion remains sound. News today happens in the newsroom. It does not happen in the real world, unless some producer thinks there might be a jump in ratings if they got a camera shot of situation X or scene Y.

Strangely, I actually think the only place where good, solid news remains is in the world of sports. And the only reason I say that is because people actually ARE so interested in sport outcomes that there is no need for a side-story about Derrick Thomas having sex with 30 women in one night. The only time those kind of stories appear, at least in my limited experience, seem to be when the rest of the press gets a hold of them. Otherwise, personal stories always revolve around the individual and the sport itself.

Now, I'm not saying that sporting news is better or more moral that other kinds. I'm just saying that both the press and the audience are much more clear on what should and should not be covered, and it seems to match the reality of what should and should not be covered.

Returning to the actual quote I singled out: there's no trust between the press and the presidency. I agree, and I think two things have caused this. First, the press spent eight years of the clinton white house reporting about true and untrue sex affairs. Certainly, they spent a healthy share covering important matters, but you always knew that news of some sexual tryst was not far from the lips of any major reporter (save, perhaps, the ones stationed in Africa, or Ireland, or Bosnia, or some other out of the way place where people kept dying and crap). In other words, I think the press spends too much time talking about the president as a person, and not enough time talking about him as a president.

Second, so far (and I only have second hand reports on this), a great deal of distance appears to be coming from this particular white house. Have you not heard the reports that this white house seems to be more secretive than any presidency in the last hundred years? Along with a "culture of life" comes, it seems, a "culture of suspicion."

I love the Daily Show.

Anyway, before deriding an entire idea because of weak examples, consider the whole idea. On the other hand, this is the internet, where whole ideas tend to be ignored and everyone exists in a land of minutia, so go ahead and keep arguing the crap. It works for the major news outlets.