Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Yet Another Washington Post Edition)

With journamalists like Howard Kurtz working for it, will the Washington Post last a decade?

Dan Froomkin writes:

Dan Froomkin - Torture Is All in the Subtext - washingtonpost.com: On his CNN show on Sunday, Howard Kurtz talked to Gloria Borger of U.S. News and David Corn of the Nation.

KURTZ: Gloria Borger, on torture of detainees, on terror on Iraq, have journalists become skeptical, if not hostile, toward President Bush?

BORGER: Well, I think you're seeing is from the press conference that, clearly, the journalists are becoming more skeptical, but what they're doing is they're really voicing the concerns of some really senior senators in Congress who have voiced those concerns. And so, you know, we live down at the bottom of the food chain. . . .

CORN: But let me make a suggestion here, too. The president and the vice president had a chance to prove to the public and the world that when they tell us things they basically get it right. But everything they said about the war in Iraq, the connections between Saddam and al Qaeda and Saddam's WMDs proved out to be wrong. Everything that Donald Rumsfeld has said about the war in Iraq in terms of how it would go has proven to be wrong. So I think any time they tell us anything, the media is right to say, 'Given your record, prove it. What do you mean?'

KURTZ: But Gloria . . . isn't it also our job to voice the concerns of politicians who might support the president?

BORGER: Well, I think it is. And some might say that journalists have been doing that for the last couple of years. But I think, honestly, that now there is a huge controversy, and what we're doing is reflecting that. . . .

KURTZ: But doesn't that run the risk of making journalists look like they're part of the opposition?