Jeff Jarvis:

I have come to believe that journalists' refusal to acknowledge that they are human and are citizens and have opinions is a sort of lie by omission and we have to find better ways to deal with it than gagging them. Journalists are in the business of uncovering truths, not covering them; journalists demand to know what everyone else in the world thinks, yet they hide their own thoughts. Isn't that a disservice to the public? For it does not allow the public to judge the messenger, as is their right.

I've been saying stuff like that for quite a while now. It's still damn good to hear it from somebody as 'inside' the media world as Jarvis (and said well, to boot).

Bottom line: why should the public trust a press corps that refuses to hold itself to the same standards of honesty and transparency that it expects everybody else to live up to? Would any reporter accept from a politician a line like, "How dare you accuse me of having political motives for my actions--that's an insult to my professional objectivity as a public servant!"

Of course not.

So why do reporters fly into a rage when somebody outside of the MSM guild wants to know who they're voting for? And why aren't they willing to be honest enough to answer that very simple question?