What is the job of the news media? To report the news. Everyone agrees about that. But some well-intentioned, self-imposed ethical guidelines that members of the news media take for granted are getting in the way of the industry's fundamental mission: telling everything they know to a public whose right to know is sacred.
You know journalists have lost their way when they cheer the arrest and potential extradition to the United States of WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange. Any of us could be next; we should be circling the wagons. Yet they insist on focusing on such inanities as Assange's personality, his "arrogance" and even his cat. Some even approve.
The other day National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" covered the 25th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide. Everyone over age 40 remembers what happened: Suffering from depression, chronic pain and opiate addiction, the singer put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off.