According to Liptak, "news organizations used to consider those kinds of lawsuits a matter of civic responsibility":

"For the last four decades, maybe longer, citizens have been able to rely on small, medium and large news organizations, mostly newspapers, to fight their access battles on their behalf," said Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press....

These days, she said, "the access litigations have dried up."

It is notable, for instance, that the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups have taken the leading role in trying to shake loose information about the Bush administration's policies and actions, while news organizations have largely sat on the sidelines.

Also notable are exactly which public interests the Times usually wields its own considerable budget in favor of--still, its valuable, if disconcerting, to read Adam Liptak reporting that the Press-Enterprise is now "so strapped that it’s quit distributing free copies of the paper to staff members in the city room."

The media advocacy group's Ben Scott further calls it

regrettable that the court tossed out an important public interest protection against excessive media consolidation. Congressional intent in the Cable Act of 1992 is very clear--the goals of federal policy in the cable industry are to promote competition, consumer choice and a diversity of programming. And yet today we have a cable cartel--the video industry is dominated by only a handful of large cable operators and studios.

Today consumers experience perpetual price hikes by large operators that already have market dominating purchasing power to decide the fate of new channels. The promises of lower prices through competition from satellite and telecom companies in the video business have never been realized.

While today "the court ruled the FCC's action as 'arbitrary and capricious,'" Free Press reminds us of how "the same court threw out the rule in 2001, but it was reinstated by the FCC in 2008 due to fears of growing market power of big cable companies."

the future of the Internet as we know it depends on maintaining freedom and openness online. This crucial legislation will help to ensure that the public--not big phone and cable companies--controls the fate of the Internet.

The rules that govern the Internet must protect economic innovation, democratic participation and free speech online. If we don't make Net Neutrality the law once and for all, we could see the innovation and promise of the Internet derailed forever.

While warning that "an army of lobbyists has been unleashed by the phone and cable companies to kill Net Neutrality so they can become the Internet's gatekeepers," Scott maintains that "the momentum is shifting in the public's favor," with "popular support...growing every day"--as evidenced by the fact that "millions have already called on our lawmakers to take action."

The current example being their July 7 front-page headliner, "In Sex Film Industry, Some Long for a Real Plot":

No, this isn't satire. It's a cover story on our nation's paper of record.... The article opens:

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. "I couldn’t wait to get my next script," she said.

There's no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

Jacobson commiserates with the Times editors' concerns: "Two wars. Jobless rate at nearly 10 percent. Healthcare in crisis. And if that weren't enough to bear, now there are dwindling plot lines in our pornography!"

Meanwhile, the same day's placement of an "In Senate, Debate on Detainee Legal Rights" piece way back on page A18 has Jacobson convinced that "apparently the Times thinks Americans are, as the kids say, so over the issue of detainee rights that the dearth of pornography plots trumped this story by 18 pages":

Intro:

Obama administration lawyers said Tuesday at a Senate hearing that detainees prosecuted by military commissions should have some of the same constitutional rights as American citizens tried in civilian criminal courts....

"So you are saying that these people who are in Guantánamo, who were part of 9/11 or committed acts of war against the United States are entitled to constitutional rights of the Constitution of the United States?" Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, asked administration officials at one point.

Looking past "this article's banishment to the back pages," Jacobson notes how "the story fails to include a substantive factual rejoinder to Senator McCain's misleading statement"--the facts being that "scores of detainees have already been released by the U.S.," but only "after being held for years with no charge and incurring what the Times calls 'brutal' interrogation techniques but the rest of the world calls 'torture.'"