Here's that must-read that's been going around, by ABC News columnist, Michael S. Malone: Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and Pensions

Go ahead and read it all, as they say.

What we're tasting is the fruit of all those people who got into journalism to "make a difference," and are now in the positions of power in the industry, who no longer believe that straight facts and fairness are sufficient. After all, these are people who have been raised with good liberal-elite contempt for their fellow Americans, and therefore their fellow Americans can't simply be entrusted to make their own decisions, they must be guided. They have been reared on the Michael Moore school of patriotism, where fellow citizens are mere objects of scorn and contempt, to be looked down on and derided. The coastal elites no longer share the values of the rest of the country, so the rest of the country can't be entrusted with the mere facts themselves for fear of what their value system may make of them. They have to be lead to the proper conclusions.

Facts? Fairness? It's your agenda and your intent that make you you, and your results that tell you whether you're a success when you get up and look in the mirror.

The media elites actually think they haven't been biased enough on Iraq and the War on Terror and that they were insufficiently biased when it came to the last two elections (imagine!), so this time they're throwing caution to the wind. As Malone calls it, it's a Hail Mary pass this time around. "After all," says Malone, " newspapers and network news are doomed anyway."

Not quite so fast, though. As powerful as the blogosphere and alternate media (including conservative talk) has become, it's not there yet. The mainstream opinion leaders (the opinion of the great moderate middle that dictates the outcome of elections) are still the major papers and the big networks. As good at agitation as the blogosphere has become, the real coup is only achieved when a scoop breaks the bonds of the blogosphere's gravity and makes orbit in the MSM. When LGF caught Rather and Mapes trying to pass of faked documents, the find achieved success when it became so big that the blogosphere could no longer contain it anymore. Only after it hit orbit in the mainstream was CBS forced to take note and toast Rather.

How will we know when the alternative media has come of age? I'll give you one indicator. If John McCain manages to pull out a win in this election, it will show that the mainstream media is no longer the gate-keeper it once was. It will show the presence of an enormous bloc so influential that pollsters will have to recalibrate how they do their calculations. It will show that all the information floating on the internet that the MSM has downplayed and hidden from sight actually find its mark in a sufficient number of voters' fingers. And that will change the whole game.

If it doesn't happen the game's not over of course. It just means we're not there yet. (And too bad, because an Obama presidency will move the country so far over to the left that it will take the range of acceptable along with it so far that we may never recover from it -- but that's an entirely different subject.)