The perils of corporate journalism

I've certainly offered my share of criticism of the mainstream media and how it operates. But for the sake of fairness, The New York Review of Books offers a good essay on some of the economic and corporate pressures faced by journalists today. The piece points out that the most significant change in journalism came as family-owned papers started selling to big media companies (or to medium-sized media chains who in turn sold to megacorporations). This essentially emasculated the public service ethos that had prevailed in mainstream journalism and introduced profit motive (as demanded by faceless stockholders) as the industry's driving force.