Commenter Danny had an interesting point in my "Judging Judy" post. He's right, we don't want to so discount the quote unquote Main Stream Media so that they all become a parody of Fox News, with their fax machines being converted to LAN-based mail relays from the Press Office of the 1600 Crew or any future administration.

Instead, I would hope that the media organizations who are not touched as deeply by the Judy Miller scandals from WMD stenography to Sleeping with Scooter, whether figuratively or whatever, take a long hard look at their news-gathering and journalistic practices overall and make adjustments to keep then next Miss (or Mr) Run Amok from showing up in their newsrooms. It would be deeply embarassing for them, I'm sure, though if it happened not undeservedly so, but worse it would provide exactly the further devaluation of the trust we all once had in the Fourth Estate to be fair arbiters of information, something the Times stopped being when they allowes Miller to practice stenography at at the salary of a Pulitzer-prize winning "investigative" reporter. From the last line of her biography:

She lectures on the Middle East, Islam, national security, and terrorism.

I guess that the headiness of access to all the "secrets" that never existed made her become what she is today, or perhaps she never really was all that and more, but just put on a really, really good front.