Sullivan sums up a lot of my thinking on why mainstream journalism is dying:

“Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do…

Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy. It also resonates with readers and viewers a lot more than passionless stenography I’m not sure why calling bullshit has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided.

The key thing that angers me about the mainstream media, especially in the political arena, is their endemic inability to seriously challenge leaders to substantiate their claims (i.e. “call bullshit”). The norm for most media (with some notable exceptions) is to simply act as scrivener to the elites in this country. You’ll find this on CNBC with the business elites and on CNN with the political elites. My view is that the reason for the explosion in readership of blogs and other so-called “new media” is that there are more people in that space willing to call bullshit on a regular basis and, not only that, substantiate their assertions with links to evidence to back themselves up.

The problem I see with taking this trend to its logical conclusion is that we run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If people get so fed up with the hackery present in, say, the Washington Post, we may ultimately inhibit their ability to do the excellent international field reporting on which so many bloggers rely.

I don’t know how this is ultimately going to play out. I’d like to think that the current climate of justified revulsion at the sins of the mainstream media leads them to someday reform their wicked ways. Unfortunately, their ongoing trend toward mindless infotainment seems to be pretty profitable for the outlets that master the craft (see, e.g., Fox News, CNN, etc.). As a result, I’m not that confident that things will ever get better.