The lynchpin of journalistic integrity and one of its key roles in our system of democracy is the separation of the press from the government and therefore from state propaganda. The Founding Fathers understood that vital role and made it abundantly clear.

Now, the Twitter Files demonstrated that separation no longer holds, at least among media outlets that worked hand-in-glove with units of government. But that alone never struck at the heart of the basic role of the Fourth Estate. But when the press becomes an arm of the law-enforcement side of government, it ceases to be the press in any meaningful way.

The Times and the Post reversed the proper role of the press as regards those leaked documents. The news media are supposed to champion the people’s right to know, to get us the facts even when doing so might be dangerous. It’s what those two very papers did in the matter of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate revelations. They did so because their owners and editors had a basic sense that We the People have a right to know what the government is up to. They did so in furtherance of the role assigned to them by, Madison, Hamilton, etc.

No longer.

[Bad couple of weeks … bad couple of decades … YMMV. I think Franklin’s right in that the media bias has turned into full-out corruption and surrender to the state, but the seeds for that sell-out got planted many years ago. This is just the bitter harvest. — Ed]