To carry your analogy a little further, I have to wonder if the problem is not one of a parasite, but of a long-latent disorder of the host.

My biggest gripe with contemporary journalism, and the biggest reason I started blogging, is that much of it is so abysmal in its execution. If journalism is a profession (as many argue that it is), then it is perhaps the only one in this country that has seen a decline in its median skill level. (And I say this as an attorney who has encountered a lot of sub-par attorneys.)

The thing that seems lacking in today's journalism (questions of bias aside), it seems to me, is the thorough understanding required to report a story adequately. The "who, what, when, where, why, and how" might provide the immediate facts, but they almost always prove insufficient to give a story the necessary context crucial to a reader.

Instead, we have "gotcha" journalism and sensationalisation becoming the norm.

We have the dumbing down of journalism itself. As a result, people are looking elsewhere for information, or tuning out altogether. And, as you suggested, the effect on our culture is breathtaking.

You're right, and it's an excellent reason to blog!

One of the things I didn't discuss is the erosion in writing skills of journalists. This, coupled with the dumbing down of the type of stories reported (shlocky human interest stuff occupying the front page) has led to the loss of intelligent readers. The problem, of course, is that catering to the less intelligent will not work if they cannot read!

I would not like to see the end of newspapers. I like the old-fashioned, "square", black-and-white look of a newspaper. Brings back good memories. All those cartoons with a boy standing on a street corner crying "Ex-tree! Ex-tree! Read all about it!", about some momentous event or other. I never did see that boy on the corner in real life, but he seems to have been a common figure in my father's day.

Reminds me of the old joke told during the New Deal era. The crusty old millionaire would buy a newspaper, glance at the headline, and then throw it away. The boy finally asked him why he did that.
The man said: "I'm looking for an obituary."
The boy said: "You won't find it there!"
The man replied: "This one will be."

When I think of newspapers, I think of our old paper, Salem, Oregon's Capital Journal (later, the Statesman-Journal). The main feature for us kids back then was the "funnies", i.e., the comic strips, and, on Sundays, the "colored funnies". Those old strips like "Pogo", "Li'l Abner", "Beetle Bailey", "Andy Capp", "B.C.". For a while there was an English strip my Dad liked, "Fred Basset", and a couple dog strips he didn't like. For a while we had "Odd Bodkins", which our friend Kim Eric Drexler especially liked, and a Christian strip called "Pilgrims". Later, sometime in the mid-1970s, we got "Doonsesbury", which my Dad also liked.

There were also the "serious funnies" like "Mary Worth", "Rex Morgan (my Dad liked that one better), M.D.", "Prince Valiant" (had I known how fascinated I would later become with that early transitional period of our Northern European West's history, I would have followed that strip more), "Steve Canyon", and "Steve Roper & Mike Nomad".

That last one was my favorite of all strips. Mike Nomad was a truck driver for "Proof" magazine, of which Steve Roper was the editor, and they also had a pretty secretary named Honeydew Melon. Mike had a Chinese landlady named Mah Jong. Roper and Nomad (and Nomad's girlfriends on occasion) constantly exposed crimes, often criminal schemes that they accidentally ran into while on vacation. They got into all kinds of situations while doing so, all kinds of predicaments. Lots of bondage scenes. "Steve Canyon" had a couple bondage scenes which have been etched indelibly into my psyche ever since (that was long before I ever heard of anything called "sex").

Other strips, e.g., "Blondie" (i.e., Dagwood Bumstead), "Dondi", "Alley Oop", "Dick Tracy", "Peanuts", "Apartment 3-G", etc., appeared in the Seattle papers when we came up to visit.

Then there was the editorial page. They had political artoons by cartoonists like Herblock (Herbert Block) and Bill Mauldin. Mauldin was drawing cartoons way back in World War II. we have a couple anthologies of his cartoons and his commentaries on them from that era, "Up Front" (his cartoons about the life of "so'jers" on the European front) and "Back Home" (dealing with the socio-political situation the "so'jers" encountered when they got back home). He was a true liberal, and toward the end of his life he came out against gun control.

There was another cartoonist who liked to slip the name of his beloved wife Lois into every cartoon and we always had fun looking for it (e.g., in the wrinkles of somebody's pants). This was long before I know anything about ideologies. I imagine they must have been liberal for that time because our parents didn't complain about it.

Later, I used to read the editorials all the time, including the letters to the editor. The page was pretty balanced, with a lot of conservative columnists in addition to the liberals. Most of the letters (or the ones that I remember anyway) were conservative. An Objectivist wrote a couple letters that I remember. For a while, I used to clip out letters, editorials, and cartoons that I particularly liked.

Somehow, I always associate that paper with my Dad (i.e., my father). Newspapapers always have a masculine look to them and I do always associate them with men or the male. Transcendental Science?

Newspapers today are killing themselves off with their Left-Wing and Communist slant. It wasn't always so. Back in my father's day, most newspapers leaned conservative overall, their wealthy Republican owners excercised much more control. But the New York Times allowed Walter Duranty in and let him lie about Stalin's atrocities. By 1964, newspapers were heavily anti-Golwater. It wasn't until the early 1970s, under Nixon and Agnew, that I first started hearing about a liberal or Left bias in the media. A book was written at that time, The Left-Leaning Antenna. For a while, there was an attempt to rectify the balance, add conservative columnists to the editorial pages, but the problem has been growing since to the point where it simply cannot be ignored. The media as a whole, newspapers, news magazines, TV, have been moving fuether and ever further and more blatantly to the Left. Major newspapers see their job no longer to be to report the news as is and then let the reader decide for himself or herself how to evaluate it, but rather to bring down any conservative or Republican President, by whatever means. (The Watergate imbroglio had a great deal to do with this, as you have often noted.) More and more readers are becoming disgusted at this and are turning away.

The real parasites who are destroying the newspapers are not bloggers but the latter-day Walter Durantys who have infiltrated and taken over. Newspapers and other media could rectify this mess by either
1) hiring more conservative reporters, editors, columnists, etc., to create a balance within each paper, or
2) openly, explicitly, honestly stating that they wish to be Liberal, Leftist, Democratic, etc., and then being countered by other papers which are openly, explicitly, honestly Conservative, Rightist, Republican, Objectivist, etc.. That has long been the practice on the European continent, going back to Chesterton's day and before, and it worked very well.

I was a newsboy who sold the Philadelphia Sunday papers on Saturday night in my home town of Mount Holly in NJ. My co worker and I took the papers in our express wagons and were posted on opposite sides of Main Street. This was in 1948-49-50. In those days Saturday night was the night all the farmers and others who lived out of town came in to do their shopping. All the stores were open and the town was lit up and crowded until nearly 10PM.

The Sunday editions probably cost about 15 or 20 cents. The daily Inquirer and Bulletin were 3 cents. I remember those prices because I had a paper route as well in those days and Saturday morning had to collect from my customers.

That little bit of nostalgia brings me to my point that I truly believe that "gotcha" journalism which started in the Nixon era and was compounded during the Reagan years was the beginning of the downfall of journalism here in the US. Sam Donaldson shouting disrespectfully at Reagan made me sick. It is worse today and I stopped reading all newsprint about 10 years ago.

That said, I would mourn the failure of the MSM, as it is still the source, however negative, of a lot of information. The blogosphere exists as an alternative to the lies and distortions in the press and TV news. The Internet would be much more barren if the MSM focused on facts instead of agenda.

I would read the papers today if I didn't know that in everyone, Bush is to blame for whatever ails the world at any given time. There is an old saying that even a blind pig finds acorns now and then. You would think that Bush gets up each morning and calls Karl Rove and says what can we do to screw up America to day. In 5 years he has certainly done something right. But you'd never know it from reading the front pages of the NYT or Wapo.

Sadly the MSM will continue their descent into oblivion, unnecessary as that may be. As the captain on the Titanic never slowed when he entered the icefield, the unsinkable NYT is taking on water and has very little to offer the very folks who might read her again.

All the books by the engineer Henry Petroski are worth reading, but his memoir Paperboy is particularly good, especially for those made newspaper-nostalgic by this post.