But did it make any sense?

Jay Rosen's The Quest for Innocence and Loss of Reality in Political Journalism.

Running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny… That sounds like the Tea Party movement I have observed, so the truth of the sentence is not in doubt. But what about the truth of the narrative? David Barstow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. He ought to know whether the United States is on the verge of losing its democracy and succumbing to an authoritarian or despotic form of government. If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story.

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways. I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.
It kept coming up, but David… did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can.

Somehow the reality that this narrative exists as a binding force within the Tea Party movement is more reportable than the fact that the movement’s binding force is a fake crisis, a delusion shared.

Fun journalism for kids with short attention spans and growing vocabularies!

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

So we should walk softly and not assume too much.

How the press can prevent another Iraq from Nieman Watchdog.
Provocation Alone Does Not Justify War. War is so serious that even proving the existence of a casus belli isn’t enough. Make officials prove to the public that going to war will make things better.
Encourage Public Debate. The nation is not well served when issues of war and peace are not fully debated in public. It’s reasonable for the press to demand that Congress engage in a full, substantial debate. Cover the debate exhaustively and substantively.

God changes with the weather by Garrison Keillor
There is a countervailing faith that says that God is in and of the world and has bestowed vast gifts to be shared with others, and that our understanding of God is faint and incomplete and so we should walk softly and not assume too much.

Moments of Regret from On The Media
It’s from The Los Angeles Times, and here’s the correction: “An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery store in Hayward, Wisconsin on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.”

Romeo and Juliet: Just as you misremembered it on NPR
"It is the East, and Juliet is the West."

The Wrong Debate on Torture from On The Media
I have to, therefore, ask you, isn't any reporting on the intelligence pros and cons of torture changing the subject in exactly the way that Dick Cheney wants it changed, from the morality and legality of torture to the efficacy of torture? Aren't you kind of being suckered by your very reporting validating the premise that effectiveness constitutes justification?

The degrading effects of terrorism fears by Glenn Greenwald
What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety. A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death. And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety. These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in our political discourse. It is fear, and only fear, that predominates. No other competing values are recognized. […] This isn't exactly new: many of America's most serious historical transgressions -- the internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyite witch hunts, World War I censorship laws, the Alien and Sedition Act -- have been the result of fear-driven, over-reaction to external threats, not under-reaction. Fear is a degrading toxin, and there's no doubt that it has been the primary fuel over the last decade.

This is why I went into journalism, initially:

Many years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the press in large and populous nations such as America for its ability to unite people who share certain beliefs about an issue but, because they feel 'insignificant and lost amid the crowd,' cannot act alone. According to Tocqueville the press fulfills its highest purpose when it serves as a beacon to bring together people who otherwise might ineffectively seek each other 'in darkness.' Newspapers can bring them 'together and... keep them united.' If there were no newspapers or if newspapers failed to do their task, he observed, 'there would be no common activity.'

Now I don't know. We treat so much drivel as news, preferring to ignore the real issues. We insist on seeing events as isolated and out of context, beyond our ability to help or even just understand. We embrace the easy answer. (Why do they hate us? Because we are free. Free to do what, exactly? Free to change the channel?) A few newspapers still serve as 'beacons,' but how many people are earnestly looking for that light? We all seem to be looking inward, we're bowling alone, and I think we're worse off for it.