Nice job, Steve. As Chris Lasch has written, the rise in the “professionalization” of the press in the U.S. tracks with the decline in citizen participation in the political process. He believed that argument was what was missing in contemporary journalism, and that differs from opinion. In many ways, the blogosphere has made argument available again, and who knows where that will lead?
Many people who don’t like this line of thought point to the ideals of fairness represented in the canons of journalistic ethics, but I don’t view it as an “all or nothing” thing. Adding argument to facts doesn’t necessarily mean tossing out the blessed canons. I will argue, though, that the First Amendment wasn’t written to protect facts, so even the ideals of some of those canons have questionable assumptions.
