Even after the disgraceful performance of so many armchair warriors during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, who would have dared predict the willingness, nay, eagerness, of respected journalists and pundits to argue in favor of purposeful ignorance? Sadly, many of them have shown less interest in potential war crimes committed by the Bush administration than little Misha Lerner, the Jewish Primary Day School fourth grader who quizzed Condoleezza Rice about her inability to explain the legality of these policies to a group of Stanford students.

While many have made the case to varying degrees, Peggy Noonan made it most explicitly: "Some things in life need to be mysterious," she said of America's role in torturing terrorist suspects. "Sometimes you need to just keep walking." And while defenders of the insider establishment may note, as a mitigating factor, that Noonan is less a journalist than an ex-Reagan flack who plays a journalist on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and ABC's This Week, what, then, to say about David Broder?

And how does Alterman describe the recent writings of the man who "sets a tone for many of his colleagues and represents a goal to which many if not most of them aspire"?--Well, "he, too, advises his colleagues to keep walking, eyes wide shut."

While "unlike their paper-based compadres, they actually had money to burn on things like newsgathering and international bureaus," Alterman and Ivory write:

If cable news is more profitable than before, that's because, increasingly, it features less and less news. It certainly contains nothing that will likely replace the reporting role of the newspapers that are currently surviving on life-support. "State of the Media" juxtaposes these robust figures with some pretty unsettling data about what people actually see on their sets:

In a news year dominated by two major stories [the election and the economy], the television sector with the most time to fill, cable news, offered the narrowest news agenda of all. According to an analysis of the coverage examined by PEJ, the cable TV channels spent about three out of every five minutes on a single story: the 2008 presidential election.

The report found "obsessive, often irrelevant horserace coverage of the election eclipsed all other news" to the extent that "it accounted for 59 percent of the cable newshole in 2008, while coverage of the economy accounted for only 10 percent." And, of course, "coverage of the Iraq War fell everywhere, but it positively crashed on cable," where it "fell nearly 90 percent" and "accounted for just 2 percent of overall coverage."