Dan Froomkin's lessons for today's journalists are, in fact, the kind of journalism that exists more in the public mind than in the public sphere. This kind of journalism is what all of us who lived through Watergate figured everyone would be doing because every journalist would want to be like Woodward and Bernstein: digging through piles of government crap to find out what really happened and who should be going to jail. Let's hear it for the little guy! We the People!

Unfortunately, people like me (and maybe you) woke up one day and realized that dream is long gone, baby. Instead, we've got today's warm-bucket-of-spit press corps who seem to agree that George Bush is just marvy and Hillary Clinton is shrill. I mean, Bill Clinton really was a liar, right? And impeaching Bush would just take us back to the past. Let's just get on with our lives. Yay, America!

If the Washington press corps had followed Froomkin's Rules for Good Journalists, we not only wouldn't have war in Iraq, we wouldn't have Bush in the first place. He would have been pegged early on as the supercilious, lying poser that he is and his campaign would have gone down in flames before he even had a chance to slime John McCain, to say nothing of Al Gore.

Froomkin's rules are great and all journalists should at least memorize them. I suppose they're even taught in America's J schools. But, as one commenter at the other blog suggested, these days anyone who actually tries to follow them is demoted or fired, while, I would add, salacious gossip-mongers like Dan Abrams are promoted into management. Anyone remember Ashley Banfield, who spoke out about the war and was immediately cashiered? And then there's Phil Donohue, who was canned for his skepticism "when our competitors are showing their patriotism" and replaced with that virulently homophobic flag-waver, Michael Savage. Even a proven old-timer like Robert Scheer was bounced from the LA Times for Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg!

Finally, there's the aformentioned Woodward, an object lesson in today's poor excuse for real journalism. Rather than continue in the muckraking spirit that might have saved us and the world a lot of grief, Woodward has turned out to be a public-good-be-damned pseudo-pundit who, when he's not extoling their virtues, hides his insights into the criminal machinations of the Bush-Cheney gang in exchange for big book royalties.

Froomkin may be God, but all that means is that there's a lot of journalistic atheists running around out there pulling down big bucks--and making people wonder whether God is dead.