It's what happens when professional publishers and journalists are taken over by the business majors whose only interest is satisfying the stockholders, who have no committment to the purpose and traditoions of the profession they now serve. The press is not a free public service, it has to be paid for by advertising as it has always been, and there is nothing wrong with that, it's how the press has always been financed. The only other alternatives are public contributions (inadequate funding) or government support (an obviously dangerous thing to do in a democracy).

But free enterprise could still coexist with good public information because of the professionalism and ethics of publishers and journalists. Their career was giving us the news, and they saw their readers/viewers, not their advertisers, as their customers. Today, the beancounters run the show, and journalists and publishers have been reduced to showbiz personalities and management specialists, respectively.

We talk about Huntley and Brinkley, Cronkite and Murrow, but imagine how Ben Franklin would have fared in this environment.