Frank Rich’s take this morning on the appalling state of The News oughta be mandatory reading:

What’s missing from News is the news. On ABC, Peter Jennings devotes two hours of prime time to playing peek-a-boo with U.F.O. fanatics, a whorish stunt crafted to deliver ratings, not information. On NBC, Brian Williams is busy as all get-out, as every promo reminds us, “Reporting America’s Story.” That story just happens to be the relentless branding of Brian Williams as America’s anchorman – a guy just too in love with Folks Like Us to waste his time looking closely at, say, anything happening in Washington.

Rich offers a sober view of the industry, but what he doesn’t do is explain how the death of News evenutally translates into the death of Democracy. As I’ve noted before, the reason we have a free press is so society has a reliable, independent watchdog to protect it from the inevitable kleptocracy and powermongering of the power elite.

If the press doesn’t do its job, we’re fucked. And these days, between:

• corporatization of the media,
• PR’s near-total seduction of the press function, and
• the administration’s repeated attempts to buy journalists and insinuate party hacks in the press corps,

not only is the henhouse not being responsibly guarded, the task of watching the chickens has been outsourced to Fox and Egg-Sucking Weasel Security, Inc.

Representative democracy, as envisioned by the framers, works pretty well so long as you have an educated, self-interested public that can be counted on to inform itself regarding the issues facing society. Maybe it never occurred to folks like Jefferson and Madison and Franklin that people wouldn’t behave that way. From their perspective, it was perhaps inconceivable that voters would pursue ignorance with as much gusto as we do in 21st Century America.

What we do know is that a system where the representatives are whores and the represented are stupid doesn’t work so well. And in such an environment, we ought to be especially distressed to look over and see our own watchdogs getting treats and belly-scritches from the thugs who have come to rob us blind.

[Thx to the pit’s institutional journalism correspondent, Pat Vecchio, for passing this on.]