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Media culpa: should a few slipshod, unethical, biased journalists cause you to distrust the whole lot of us? Yes. And that's probably a good thing for democracy.

Article Excerpt
If you believe what you read and hear these days, we are living through a sort of journalistic Dark Ages, an era of fabrication, plagiarism, and bias on an epic scale. Examples are everywhere but most prominently in the nation's leading newspapers. In January Jack Kelley, a star reporter for USA Today, resigned after it was discovered that he has made up parts of eight major stories and stolen material that wasn't his. Last year a young reporter named Jayson Blair resigned in May from the New York Times for likewise making up or stealing parts of stories for several years. Subsequently, his colleague Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer prize winner, resigned following the disclosure that his byline appeared on stories he didn't really report in places he never went or visited only briefly. In the wake of the Blair fiasco, a dozen other newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, discovered similar problems. Then, in the fall of 2003, buttressing these images of the media as an ethical wasteland, came the premiere of the film Shattered Glass, a movie about a reporter who falsified all or parts of some two dozen stories for the New Republic in the late nineties. As a reward for his fabrications, the reporter, Stephen Glass, was paid a good deal of money for his own book, The Fabulist.

Those reporters were not, unfortunately, the only ones playing fast and loose with journalistic ethics. Here in Texas, the Houston Chronicle suspended columnist Mickey Herskowitz earlier this year for self-plagiarizing from a column he wrote for the Houston Post in 1990. In...

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