The media's predictable objections notwithstanding, I don't see anything egregiously wrong with the new Department of Defense guidelines for interaction with the press, issued in the wake of the series of massive indiscretions on the part of General Stanley McChrystal and his staff that led to an extremely unflattering Rolling Stone article and the General's subsequent dismissal from his role at the U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Reporters expressed discomfort with Defense Secretary Robert Gates insistence that the Pentagon's public affairs unit be notified "prior to any interviews or any other means of media and public engagement with possible national or international implications." At a press conference after Gates' memo was made public, reporters made the case that almost every story they worked on had "national or international implications" and suggested that the new guidelines contradicted the Obama administration's pledge to be more transparent than its predecessors.

There is no reason why the involvement of Defense Department public affairs professionals should mean less transparency. In fact, there is no reason it should not mean greater transparency. Talking to those who have experience working with the military, the general feeling seems to be that PR people are more often advocating for better communication. Of course, that advocacy stops short of the kind of colorful, entertaining indiscretion that McChrystal's staff engaged in, the kind of indiscretion that destroys careers and drives magazine sales.

But Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters: "The bottom line is if we do this properly you will hardly notice the impact." And Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, makes it clear that the military brass understands the importance of good media relations: ""We need to tell our story. It needs to be done well. It needs to be told smartly. We need to learn the right lessons, not the wrong ones."

The new policy--if it is implemented responsibly and with common sense--seems like an entirely reasonable response to a public relations faux pas.

Still wondering why the mainstream media are having difficulty adapting to the social media world? Check out a thoroughly confused column from the Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, in the wake of the Post's precipitous decision to fire a columnist because his political views became known.

On the one hand, Alexander says, the solution to any confusion about reporters who also write opinion pieces, or write opinionated blogs is to be "completely transparent about what people do . . . and completely transparent about where people stand."

On the other hand, those in traditional reporting positions should remain "nonpartisan, unbiased and free from slant in their presentation in the paper and in any other public forum. There should be no appearance of conflict."

Am I the only one who thinks that those two statements are contradictory? In the first, Alexander is advocating complete transparency, a principle I support (though I'm not sure how practice complete transparency is. In the second, however, he is arguing for complete opacity: under no circumstances should readers know the political views of people in "traditional reporting positions."

Unless those people have no political views--something that's virtually inconceivable--that surely requires hiding those views from readers? Surely any attempt to eliminate the "appearance of conflict" must necessarily involve either concealing the real views of reporters or pretending they don't have any? That's the very opposite of transparency.

Perhaps it's time for the Post and other mainstream media outlets to start treating readers like adults--rather than patronizing them, as the headline to this column does--and to acknowledge that reporters have political views just like everyone else. Preventing a reporter from attending an environmental rally, for example, doesn't make that reporter any less committed to the cause of environmentalism; it merely obfuscates the truth.

Let's be transparent about that--and then judge the quality of a reporter's work on its merits, rather than on how well he or she conceals his true beliefs.

In a column more interesting for its hyperbole and political bias than any rational argument, Dan Calabrese (who says he worked in public relations for 12 years) calls the Obama administration's decision not to back down from a fight with Fox News the "dumbest PR move ever" and

Let's deal with the cliché, never-pick-a-fight-with-a-man-who-buys-ink-by-the-barrel argument first. Calabrese trots out the familiar conventional wisdom: "You have to deal with the media, even if they're not entirely fair, and the worst thing you can do when they've got their eye on you is to try to shut them out, hoping that somehow they will just move on to something else," he writes. And later: "This, however, is the first White House where the media relations geniuses surrounding the president thought they could make a media outlet go away by essentially pretending it doesn't exist."

But I don't get any sense that the White House PR team--the sharpest ever to occupy that building, in my opinion--is hoping that somehow Fox will just move on to something else, or that they think they can make a media outlet go away by essentially pretending it doesn't exist.

Rather, I think that they have come to the (in my opinion belated) realization that engaging with Fox News is simply pointless. There is no evidence to suggest that he network would produce more balanced news if it received full cooperation: the administration's frequent, almost obsequious attempts at outreach to the "network" have demonstrated that making nice is not going to cause Fox to abandon its war on the Obama presidency. And there is no evidence that Fox's coverage will become less balanced simply because the administration disengages. How could it?

But the broader question raised by Calabrese's rant is whether it makes sense to treat Fox News as a part of the media, or whether it is in fact an activist organization. Is Fox News driven by a public interest mission of informing and enlightening, or by a partisan political agenda? The network's role in organizing and recruiting for the tea party protests earlier this year seems to me to position it squarely as a political advocacy organization rather an a news-gathering enterprise.

So Fox News--in terms of its mission and motives--bears more resemblance to, say, Daily Kos, than it does to The New York Times or CNN. (I don't mean to suggest that Daily Kos would ever sink to the ethical depths of Fox News in terms of its accuracy and intellectual honestly; I was merely looking to identify a similarly ideological "news" organization on the other end of the political spectrum.)

The question of whether organizations have an obligation to engage with their ideological adversaries--and what form that engagement should take--is quite different how an organization should respond to the media.

Every organization finds itself with faced with activist groups who can never be placated, because they have no interest in the organization's perspective, the facts or the truth. At some point, an organization has to decide whether engagement with those groups has any chance of success. If it doesn't, the organization is smart to dedicate its resources to those critics with whom it has a chance of establishing a genuine dialogue.

There is zero chance of any kind of honest dialogue, engagement, or consensus between this administration and Fox News. Once the latter elected to wage a war against the administration, there was simply no reason for the White House communications team to waste any more of its own time and energy and public's hard-earned money.

Two news items from the past week provide an illustration of two of the key reasons for the increasing irrelevance of the mainstream media.

The first is the Washington Post's decision to dispose of the services of Dan Froomkin, author of its White House Watch online column. Much of the criticism of this decision has focused on the fact that Froomkin is one of the few remaining liberal voices at a publication that is increasingly earning the title "Fox on 15th Street"

But the fact is that Froomkin was one of the Post's best reporters, period, regardless of ideology. His strength resided in the fact that he was prepared to go beyond the stenography that passes for mainstream journalism at the Post and elsewhere these days. Rather than simply repeating the "he said, she said" from either side of the political aisle, he was actually prepared to point out the facts of an issue--even if those facts demonstrated that one side was clearly lying.

Such fact-checking has come to be seen as a threat to the perceived objectivity of outlets such as the Post--and more to the point as a threat to their continuing access to the establishment whose protection is now their primary function.

The second illustration came after President Obama had the temerity to take a question from an ordinary Iranian citizen--transmitted via Huffington Post reporter Nico Pitney--rather than from a "real reporter."

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank--you know he's a "real reporter" because he once asked the President a question about how he looked in a bathing suit--devoted an entire column to a prolonged whine about how "The use of planted questioners is a no-no at presidential news conferences, because it sends a message to the world -- Iran included -- that the American press isn't as free as advertised."

Read the entire column, and see if you can detect any threat to a free press from the events he's writing about--except of course, that the rise of citizen journalists threatens the media establishment, especially if their questions are tougher and more sensible than most of those asked by the supposed professionals, as this one was.

Earlier this year, consultant/teacher/Internet guru Clay Shirky made an observation both self-evident and--in the context of the current debate over the future of the media--profound: "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

Ah, but what kind of journalism? Journalism, after all, is a catch-all term that covers everything from opinion and punditry to investigative work to mere stenography.

I'd make the case that newspapers--indeed, the mainstream media generally--have in recent years been producing far too much of the last. Political reporting, in particular, largely consists of writing down what a representative of one political party has to say, then finding a member of the opposing party to say something different, and then presenting the quotes of both and leaving readers to decide for themselves who--if anyone--is right. No effort is made to evaluate the truthfulness or intellectual honesty of the quotees.

Rarely has this been more evident than in the coverage of President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotamayor. The public utterances--or in the case of Newt Gingrich, the public tweets--of her opponents have been duly transcribed (or copied-and-pasted), but few if any mainstream media outlets have taken the time to inform their readers as to whether these claims are borne out by the facts.

That's a little odd, given that the facts--represented by the hundreds of opinions Sotamayor has rendered from the bench during her career--are easily obtainable by anyone prepared to do a little digging. Thankfully, someone was: by far the best journalism surrounding the nomination has come from the blogosphere, and in particular from SCOTUSblog, which--as the name suggests--is primarily focused on Supreme Court issues.

We already know that the blogosphere can produce a broader, richer range of opinion journalism than the mainstream media, presenting viewpoints regularly excluded from newspapers and television (atheist perspectives, for example, which are of particular interest to me). It is now becoming increasingly clear that the blogosphere can outperform traditional media when it comes to investigation.

Unless the mainstream media gets its house in order, all that's going to be left to it is stenography--the least interesting, least valuable kind of journalism there is.

In an insightful essay for Columbia Journalism View, veteran journalist Walter Pincus offers a pretty good analysis of what's wrong with mainstream media--or at least one significant aspect of what's wrong, castigating his colleagues for "chasing the false idols of fame and fortune" and also complaining that "we have turned into a public-relations society. Much of the news Americans get each day was created to serve just that purpose--to be the news of the day. Many of our headlines come from events created by public relations."

That might sound like a good thing--to public relations people at least--but it's not. Public relations--or the media relations component of it, at least--depends on credible media for its potency. It sounds perverse, but if PR is too powerful--as in the Bush administration's selling of the war, an example cited by Pincus--then the media use their usefulness and PR loses its potency.

This insight, whole not exactly original, is key: "Today," says Pincus, "mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, presenting both or all sides as if they were refereeing a game in which only the players -- the government and its opponents -- can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people's ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance, and at times even accuracy."

It's always seemed odd to me that PR people constantly invite reporters to speak at conferences, telling them how to do their jobs better. It never happens the other way around, but it should: to read this Pincus column is to realize that as a rule, PR people are the ones doing their jobs well; journalists are the ones who need advice on how to do them better.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter."

More than 220 years have passed, and technology has evolved. So let's ask ourselves: was Jefferson making the case for a free press in general, for the broad dissemination of information and opinion to the citizenry, or was he making the case that the only appropriate way to achieve the broad dissemination of information and opinion was via the combination of dead trees and ink?

The Guardian's Henry Porter apparently believes the latter to be true, using the Jefferson quote as partial justification for a rant against Google that blames the search engine for the demise of his industry.

"Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time," writes Porter. "One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt... and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive.... In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial." (It is notable that the reader comments following Porter's blog demonstrate considerably more knowledge, thought, understanding and perspective than the column itself--in indication, perhaps, of the real reason mainstream journalism is being undone by citizen journalism).

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press have been taking their own shots at Google. "There is no doubt that certain Web sites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet," said Robert Thomson, the Journal's editor.

That theme was pretty much a constant through the first few days of the Newspaper Association of America's annual meeting in San Diego, where several speakers suggested measures to ensure that Google could no longer drive traffic to their sites as a means to reviving their failing business.

Jeff Jarvis is doing an outstanding job of blogging from and about the meeting, and offered his own suggestion about the speech the newspaper industry needed to hear in response.

"Yesterday, you delivered a foot-stomping little hissy fit over Google and aggregators. How dare they link to you and not pay you? Oh, I so want Eric Schmidt to tell you today that you're getting your wish and that Google will no longer link to you. Beware what you wish for. You'd lose a third of your traffic overnight. If other aggregators (I work with one) and bloggers (I am one) and Facebook all decided to follow suit, you'd lose half your traffic....

"Your Google snits don't even address your far more profound problem: the vast majority of your potential audience who never come to your sites, the young people who will never read your newspapers.... You had a generation to reinvent the business but you did too little."

When Google chief executive Eric Schmidt did address the NAA, he offered a much milder, more conciliatory take than Jarvis. Of course, he could afford to. Thanks to the newspaper industry's ineptitude, he holds all the cards.

Economics blogger Dean Baker weighs in on attempts to defend CNBC--and financial reporting in general--and makes many of the same points I did, only more succinctly and knowledgeably.

"This is pathetic. Financial reporters did not need subpoena power, they did not need access to AIG's books, they did not even need to know what a credit default swap was. They just needed to know arithmetic.

"The basic story is as simple as you can possible have. Nationwide house prices tracked inflation for 100 years from 1895 to 1995. In the decade from 1996 to 2006, they rose by more than 70 percent after adjusting for inflation, creating more than $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth.

"There was no remotely plausible explanation for this increase in house prices on either the supply-side or the demand side. If there is a huge divergence from a 100-year long trend, with no explanation based on fundamentals, how could it be anything over than a bubble?"

Washington Post columnist Roger Cohen "defends" Jim Cramer and CNBC from Jon Stewart in a piece that begins by explaining why Stewart was wrong "about the financial media, particularly CNBC and its excitable analyst Jim Cramer. They didn't cover up the story of financial shenanigans. They didn't even know it existed."

Isn't that precisely Stewart's point: that while advertising themselves as knowledgeable insiders, all CNBC's reporters did was swallow whatever corporate America's chief executives--and yes, their PR people--were feeding them? More to the point, CNBC--along with most of the rest of the media--steadfastly ignored people who were trying to point out that the emperors of Wall Street had no clothes.

For what it's worth, economist Dean Baker was talking about the risks inherent in the housing bubble back as early as 2002; Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman sounded the alarm on numerous occasions, from at least 2005 onwards; Nouriel Roubini warned of the brewing crisis in September 2006.

Of course, economic experts who did not buy into the bull market orthodoxy were systematically excluded from CNBC--indeed, from the media generally--while the bubble was still expanding. The people the media relied on for "expertise," the people cited in Cohen's column, were business leaders--Hank Greenberg, Richard Fuld, Sandy Wiell--who had a vested interest in keeping the bubble inflated. (Cohen then has the nerve to point to the fact that they lost money when the bubble collapsed as evidence of their innocence, when the truth is it points to precisely the opposite conclusion.)