For some of the most sanctimonious journalistic mannerism you're ever likely to read, see. It includes this choice paragraph: "The New York Times continues as before. Every morning, stacks of The Times are piled at newsstands throughout the city; every morning, newspaper carriers toss plastic bags containing that day's issue onto the lawns of readers from Oregon to Maine. What remains unclear is how long those copies will carry the dust from the public collapse of a young journalist's career." I seem to recall that Janet Cooke's infamous article began in similarly faux-Sirk-ian tones, something like: "Fear hung like misplaced tinsel over the streets of..." or somesuch. (I remember it well, because the day it first ran, I read it, was astounded that the Washington Post was accepting that kind of florid crap as even possibly truthful, and clipped the article to share my astonishment with anyone who'd listen.) Most impressive here is the way that the fourth estate continually falls into self-deception and -absolution by failing to imagine that, while it lays absurd claim to pious objectivity, it in fact resides within the structures of wholesale self-deception that are the hallmark of so much of American culture. This is, of course, a rhetorical question - Holden Caulfield expressed, long ago, the futility and frustration of trying to sound the alarm on the issue of The Status of The Bogus in the Middle-Class American Mentality.