"The folks eager to grant absolution to CBS, or to at least walk away from what they see as the train wreck, should read France's book. Of course the injury done to innocent victims of sexual assault cannot be compared to the costs of agenda journalism to the public's expectation of objective reporting; but a cover-up is a cover-up."

It seems like the author is saying that sexual assault is worse to agenda journalism.
I see it very differently. I would say that sexual assualt of dozens or hundreds of boys as insignificant as compared to the agenda journalism.
Because of the extremely low quality of MSM, one could brush off the whole institution as unimportant or as whole business as some weird sick joke. The parady of it's irrelevance and utter nonsense has been rich resource for comedians whether it was for Saturday Nite Live [before that show became tired {decades ago}] or currently The Daily Show [which as surely as the force of gravity; it shall evenually become transformed into bland and tasteless performance- some black hole for all the talentless schmucks in the universe to converge- this is assuming the Daily Show successful enough to warrant such an "honor"].
But despite the fact that the majority of American public see MSM for what it is, it's still a powerful influence. I would say the misinformation and shitty performance of MSM has costs us hundreds of billions dollars and rivers of American blood.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you listen to Dan Rather or some other twit, they will tell you that the News portion of their broadcast, loses them money. They will suggest the Networks only do the News, because of something like their "sense of duty to people". This is fucking crap. They do the news because of their "agenda journalism". It's that simple. The MSM are lobbyists of the America Public.
If the news was actually a service to the public, why did the networks, worry about CNN when it first showed up? Shouldn't they have have instead said, "Oh, look Ted Turner can provide this public service and we can pay more attention to where we really make our money". Instead they were worried that he was going take away their whole ball game. The news is the whole ballgame, that's the main reason networks are bought and controlled: to control the news.
The reason we currently have a prohibtion on certain drugs is solely due to MSM. The war in Vietnam was largely influenced by the Media. Kerry got at least 10 points from MSM. Iraq's Saddam thought [for some reason] that the MSM would be serious factor in detering America [in both Gulf I and II]. The list is endless. And even more significant is all the stuff they aren't covering. Now, reasons given for such poor coverage on practically ever topic is that the News is too expensive as it is. But remember that logic depends on the fairy tale that there is limit to how much network can spend on their "public service" known as the news.