I began writing this as a comment to mcjoan's excellent diary WaPo, So Much Wanking, So Little Time, but it ballooned to such a length that I couldn't in good conscience post it in that setting. The Washington Post's past glories make it one of the most glaring and painful examples of what has happened to the news media: How it has, in essence, become an inversion of itself - an institution whose instincts are to suppress and distort.
Even when the public is overwhelmingly engaged and looking for reality-based journalism, media organizations resist delivering out of survival imperative: Fake news can be manufactured formulaically and create more or less reliable revenues, but nobody can predict how actual events shape up. Truth is a poor commodity, because its content (i.e., its effect) is unknowable prior to arrival.
So as people demand real coverage, and the media is forced to deliver some semblance of it (as minimally as possible), their business models are jeopardized. Media organizations must fight this change in their audience by cultivating a more "workable" viewpoint - one without any standard of relevancy, objectivity, or rational proportionality.
The most advantageous position, from which profit-optimal fictions can best be created, is neutrality-by-average: Everything is deemed to be opinion, and the standard by which all coverage is measured is the dead-center of all views expressed, weighted by vehemence and political power. Deviating too far from this "net center" becomes the definition of "bias," which had originally been manipulating facts to suit a predetermined conclusion - i.e., exactly what they are doing. In other words, the media whose stated purpose is speaking truth to power instead becomes an amplifier for its dogmas.
Therein we find not only the Iraq war propaganda, but all subsequent pseudo-coverage including editorials like that critiqued by mcjoan. The overwhelming and undeniable fact that "harsh interrogation" is torture must be averaged with the fact that a small number of people with a tremendous amount of power and a very loud voice insist to the contrary. To report a fact as a fact that is contradicted vehemently by someone with power would constitute "bias" in this view - because their version of reality is a delirious, indeterminate soup of mutually exclusive claims without any objective firmament or empirical standard whatsoever.
But this media phenomenon is more than a frustration, and more than an embarrassment: It is an agent of chaos, because rationality, transparency, and rule of law limit the raw material of lies and delusion that feed their business model. We must find a way to deal with it, because simply declaring the blogs triumphant and the older media "irrelevant" is fatuous and delusional.
We must face the fact that the "free" press is no longer free, and the rabid animal that has taken its place is eating away at the foundations of Western civilization with the delirium it spins every day. It is as if our society has contracted an autoimmune disorder, and the Fourth Estate charged with defending truth has begun attacking the very roots of public sanity.
Somehow, we have to take it back. Bloggers can't replace professional journalists, and we are deluding ourselves if we insist otherwise. Daily Kos would never have uncovered Watergate, or any of Seymour Hersh's findings, or anything like them: We can access files that are made public; we can email people seeking comment; we can even do a little amateur sleuthing; but there will be no secret meetings in parking garages with high-level FBI agents; no classified files dumped in our laps; no top whistleblowers risking their lives or livelihoods, placing their faith in the competence and discretion of a part-time amateur journalist. We somehow have to take back these iconic publications, there's just no way around it - they are symbols, and they damage our society much faster than they damage their own influence over it.