Back in February, Glenn Reynolds wrote, "With a nod to the movie Spinal Tap, I would say the media treatment of Bush administration scandals 'goes to 11'".

Of course, that's far from its only excess, as Peter Kann, the chairman of Dow Jones writes:

The media's short attention span. As the press hops from Baghdad to Beirut, Natalee Holloway to Valerie Plame, Super Bowls to Super Tuesdays, it justifiably can blame some combination of the nature of the news and the short attention span of the public. The public, meanwhile, bombarded and bewildered can blame a fickle and shallow press. There are too many instant celebrities. Too many two-day crises. Too many "defining moments" from people in search of instant history. In a world where everything is considered critical, nothing needs to be taken very seriously.

The matter of power. The press is at least partially responsible for greater public skepticism toward traditional institutions in America. But the truth, not lost on our public, is that the press is a large and powerful institution, too: "60 Minutes" is more powerful than almost all of the subjects it exposes. This newspaper, arguably, has more influence on national economic policy than do most corporations. Networks are owned by giant industrial corporations, magazines by entertainment conglomerates, and most newspapers by national chains. Given these realities, we cannot plausibly pretend to be a David out there smiting Goliaths and expect the public to believe it.

Read the whole thing, as they say in the New, New Journalism.

Update: Meanwhile, Bryan Preston has some thoughts on how the media operates in the Middle East:

To point out that Reuters’ Parisa Hafezi has published, on Reuters’ byline, the closest thing to the Iranian government’s point of view that won’t show up on Mahmoud’s letterhead. A Google search on “Parisa Hafezi” turns up a mine of stories couched from that perspective, more or less. This is how Parisa Hafezi can continue to operate within the tyranny that is the Islamic Republic of Iran, and this is the product that Reuters puts out to its thousands of outlets around the world. Hafezi is useful to Iran, by publishing its perspective (though it’s often tin-eared and cluess, as in calling David Duke a “US academic”) as hard news.

Would Reuters publish a news story written from a more or less American government perspective, like it does routinely with the work of Parisa Hafezi?

Don’t make me laugh. Again.

The good news is that, as Kann wrote above, fortunately, a reasonable percentage of the American public understands that. The bad news is that a large percentage of the population of the Middle East doesn’t, and tends to view AP and Reuters as quasi-governmental agencies themselves. Given the intertwining of the media and government in their own nations, why wouldn't they?

More: Dean Barnett adds, "I’ve wondered if I would prefer newspapers that considered it their core mission to be sticking their collective thumb into the collective eye of domestic political forces that I don’t like. And you know what? I’d take a pass":

Don’t get me wrong. I love journalistic endeavors with an agenda like The Weekly Standard and National Review. I’m even thrilled to contribute to them when they give me the opportunity to do so. But they’re not newspapers. They don’t pretend to gather “all the news that’s fit to print.” They print analyses of whatever strikes their fancies in any given issue.

But for news, I just want the raw data. Frankly, I wouldn’t want a newspaper to consider its core mission over the next two years to serve as an adversarial force to Nancy Pelosi. And I certainly wouldn’t buy such a rag.