But if reporters wonder why no one pays them any mind, it's because there's always something more important than getting the tough story. And reporters in this whole bad period have chosen the easy way out-- all those who knew that Karl Rove was involved in the Plame outing and wrote stories that pretended that "no one" knew....

Eventually this time will be over, and maybe reporters won't have such difficult dilemmas then, when Bush is back on his ranchette.

you are asking james p to take a hacksaw to his job. he has mouths to feed (possibly), a mortgage to pay, and do you really think anyone else pays what time pays to cover TV?

not a chance. he's in the opinion ghetto of cultural criticism--he's allowed to mouth off exactly as much as he has here. any more and the far better paid kristol will get pissy and talk to the guys who sign everyone's checks.

to be fair, it is hard to credit james with "having a set" if you know what i mean, given that he mentions the extraordinarily wrongheaded kristol without getting into it. a list of kristol's intellectual malfeasance could stretch from LA to NY without missing a red state. truly a repugnant man and time's board should be deeply deeply ashamed. but being rich and powerful these days means never having to say you're sorry.

good luck james.

Well, yeah, because you guys let it happen. Who is on the news shows? The pundits. Who get the book deals? The pundits. And actual reporters let themselves be marginalized. The public didn't do that-- you did, and your editors did.

Here Time is, closing foreign bureaus, but hiring the overpaid (any pay for them is over) Kristol and Halperin. What are your readers supposed to think?

The problem is, your magazine and other MSM are training readers to expect ill-informed opinion rather than facts. Why? I get the idea that your bosses think Kristol will make them more money, and maybe he will. (It's hard to imagine Mark Halperin brings along a big group of readers, however, so how did THAT happen? It doesn't even seem to make $ sense.)

The for-real reporters should have banded together long ago to save their profession. If the pundits have taken over-- and they have-- and the public assumes that Charles Krauthammer is a reporter, and reporters are supposed to bloviate about any and all subjects, especially those they know nothing about, well, reporters should have spoken up. Goodness knows, we readers out here wanted more than that, but we get dismissed as "partisan" and "nutcases" and such for caring about your profession's ethics and direction.

Silence really doesn't become a journalist. And so your unwillingness to critique your own magazine seems like discretion taken, once again, way too far. If you really think Time/CNN would fire you for that, while paying Glenn Beck to compare Gore to Hitler (because Gore is worried about global warming, that evil guy!), then if I were you, I'd be looking for a better employer.

Yeah, he stands on the side of reality. Nice to see for a change...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/26/moyers/index.html

Be sure to check out "Update II" re CBS' Knoller's unbelievable head-in-the-sand response. The worst thing he has to say about the White House press corps (and by implication himself) is that they are an "irascible and unlikable bunch". It's as if he thought the problem must be that the press corps asked too many tough questions, dug too hard and wouldn't cut the powers that be a break.

But it is conflated in Washington. It is hard to tell reporters and pundits apart. What is Andrea Mitchell? Cokie Roberts? Tim Russert? They are reporter/pundit combos.

The most cringeworthy scenes in the Moyers piece; 1) Tim Russert saying he wishes somebody had called him. Apparently he doesn't know it is his job to call and check facts. 2) Bill Safire getting a presidential medal. Sums up the corrupt, incestious relationship between the press and the Bush regime.

Where was the press when the reconstruction contracts were distributed without competition and on a cost-plus basis, where the contractors were guaranteed a profit margin calculated as a percentage of their costs, so the higher the costs, the higher the profits!

What?, you guys are next in line???!!!

Then the media goes on to Phase 3 of the Stephan Colbert treatment: Writing about how angry and vulgar left-wing commenters and bloggers are.

Really, we've seen this all before.

Screw you