"St. Luke, report to the newsroom"

For a journalist of any standing in the profession, for a wordsmith with at least a shred of self-respect for what he or she does for a living, the results of a recent poll of the American public has to be dispiriting news.

According to the poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Americans make no distinctions, or only the slightest distinctions, between Bob Woodward, mainstay of The Washington Post and one of the reporters whose work during the Watergate scandal helped dismantle the Nixon presidency, and commentator Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News pit-bull apologist for the conservative right running roughshod over America.

Some 40 percent of the 1,500 adults who responded to the poll taken in the spring said they thought O'Reilly was a journalist, while 30 percent said Woodward was one, and (it gets worse) 27 percent said talk show host Rush Limbaugh was a journalist. One in five said they considered newspaper columnist George Will to be a journalist.

Displaying a withering grasp of the obvious, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the policy center, told The Associated Press that the results of the poll suggest the public defines the word "journalist'' far differently than those in the press define it. And not surprisingly, O'Reilly leaped into the fray saying that the poll indicated the dawn of a new day in American media, and proclaiming the end of the traditional sources of power and influence in the media (also perfectly obvious to anyone who's watched the network newscasts of the Three Wise Men over the last six months).

Not that we needed another poll to tell us; the Annenberg survey just confirms what we've known for some time: These are grim times for journalism in America. Setting aside the impact of such confidence destroyers as Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley and other fabulists masquerading as journalists, the media's complicity in reporting the war effort from an administration perspective while insisting it remains independent, skeptical and disinterested has led to the worst kind of disconnect: the press unplugged from the people the press purports to represent.

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The gravity of the situation was distilled last month with Newsweek's clumsy mea culpa over Iraq-war related reporting in its Periscope section [see "The Magazine in the Toilet"]. And an earlier State of the News Media poll, released late in 2004 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, revealed that public perception of the media and the way it performs its mission had fallen to the point where Americans regarded the press as a motley collective of reactionary, self-protective liars and prevaricators one notch above child molesters (I exaggerate there, but not by that much).

Between 1985 and 2002, the Pew poll found, the number who thought news organizations were moral fell from 54 percent to 39 percent. Those who felt news organizations tried to conceal their mistakes rose from 13 percent to 67 percent. And the number of Americans who thought news organizations were highly professional declined from 72 percent to 49 percent.

Americans, Pew found, "increasingly think the press as a whole is motivated by money and individual journalists by personal ambition."

How did it get this bad? Can this marriage be saved? The answer is yes, of course; as Watergate illustrates, all it might take is one overarching constitutional crisis from an administration, a situation reported aggressively and accurately by journalists, to return the press to the good graces of the nation. But there is no escaping the fact that, in a big way, the press has no one to blame for the current mess but ... the press. Of all the books to be found and consulted in today's American newsroom, the Bible cries out for a quick reading. Not the whole book, but one passage in particular.

From Luke 4:23: "Physician, heal thyself ... "