Karen, my first “real” job after I was graduated from college 33 years ago was working for a daily newspaper. It was a typical statist publication, and most of the “beats” were covering different government agencies. Of course, that meant that the reporters were chummy with officials, both elected and “appointed.”

The police beat reporter, for example, always took the police line as being the unvarnished truth, and he was backed up by his bosses. He later took a job as the publicity officer for the local sheriff. (I almost was fired for making the “shocking” statement to someone that police officers often lie in court proceedings and elsewhere.)I wrote my doctoral dissertation on newspapers, and have published some academic papers as well as other articles on the relationship between journalists and government. While journalists are fond of saying that they are the “watchdogs” of government, that is a bald-faced lie.

When the New York Times performs its “watchdog” tricks on government, it usually is to castigate the government for not using more force, either in regulating private economic affairs or coercing people to do what the lefties at the Slimes are demanding. For example, we have heard a series of whines from the editors at the Slimes that the Bush administration did not “do enough” on the “global warming” front, and that government needs to impose taxes and other rules on the rest of us to keep us from driving automobiles as much as we would like.

I would challenge any reader to show me one time — one time — when the editorial page of a newspaper has not advocated increases in state power, either on the right (invade or bomb another country or ratchet up the drug war) and on the left (stop global warming, or we need more government regulations of business). There is no greater advocate of the totalitarian state than the typical journalist, so we should not be surprised when journalists begin to demand that the government bail them out, too.

Jim Bennett of George Mason University once told me that “technology undermines government,” and it seems that technology also undermines newspapers. Since newspapers and government pretty much are joined at the hip, we should not be surprised to see that these “freedom-loving” journalists are going to demand censorship against competitors.

Don’t forget that the NY Slimes and Washington Post were at the forefront of demanding passage of the execrable McCain-Feingold Act which criminalizes political speech from entities other than newspapers. That is right; journalists already are on the record demanding arrest and imprisonment of their competitors. Why should we not be surprised?