Journalist/blogger/media critic Jay Rosen was on the Hugh Hewitt show last week and he said something that I think is spot-on regarding how the media portrays itself to the public:

HH: Let me give you an alternative resolution to this, Jay Rosen. The paper should just admit that their journalists are polemicists who carry their opinions with them into battles, that it's as biased as the day is long, and in fact, getting longer. They're not objective, they never have been. You know, they just ought to let Hiltzik be Hiltzik, and tell all their reporters to finally come clean about the fact that they're shills for the left.

JR: (laughing) Well, I wouldn't...I don't sign on to all of that, Hugh, but I sign onto a big chunk of it, which is this. Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News, wrote a post at my blog called The End Of Omniscience In Network News. The era of omniscience is over, is what he said. And his insight was that if you don't claim this purity and sort of completeness of vision, that it's actually going to benefit you in the long run, because it's easier to establish trust based on a more modest, limited claim. And my view is that if you say the Los Angeles Times has no opinions, it has no perspective on the world, it has no outlook on life, that you've actually claimed too much for yourself, and it doesn't help you. And so I think not just the L.A. Times, but the mainstream journalism world has to negotiate its way to another way of being trusted. This one is broken. I'm not sure I agree with you on what their outlook is, but it doesn't matter. The system of trust is broken.

Exactly!