The truth is not that the problem is the newsroom does not understand capitalism. The problem is that the front office does not understand journalism. The problem is not that the average reporter does not understand what it is that's necessary to make the payroll, to make the good edifice, to make the thing that he wants. It is that in fact those who control too many of the edifices have actually come to believe that Wall Street has wisdom, and that that wisdom should instruct our business.

But what we know, we who are either observers of a business we once were in and loved, or are people within it now, our business as a whole, when it is not obsessed with the business of business, is eaten up with a form of cultural conservatism which is truly amazing. Indeed, more often than not it is eaten up with pure reactionary-ism.

The truth is not that the problem is the newsroom does not understand capitalism. The problem is that the front office does not understand journalism. The problem is not that the average reporter does not understand what it is that's necessary to make the payroll, to make the good edifice, to make the thing that he wants. It is that in fact those who control too many of the edifices have actually come to believe that Wall Street has wisdom, and that that wisdom should instruct our business.

Virtually all the trends that matter are making a mockery of the industry's ritual incantations about the values and virtues of a free press in a free society.