Ed Wasserman thinks that News producers are under siege from the digital brownshirts Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

It's hard now even to write for publication without being aware of just how thoroughly what you say is going to be inspected for any trace of undesirable political tilt and denounced by a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors.

If that's apparent to me as a mere columnist, I can only imagine the current mind-set of supervising editors: If we give prominence to this story of carnage in Iraq, will we be accused of anti-administration bias? And - here it gets interesting - will we therefore owe our readers an offsetting story, perhaps an inspirational tale of Marines teaching young Iraqis how to play softball?

Now, both stories may well be integral to the news. If so, both should be told. The problem arises when the pressure to tell the softball story comes not from a principled desire to deliver a factual account that is broadly emblematic of significant happenings in Iraq, but from a gutless attempt to buy off a hostile and suspicious fragment of the audience base.

News then becomes a negotiation - not a negotiation among discordant pictures of reality, as it always is, but an abject negotiation with a loud and bullying sliver of the audience. News of great significance becomes not an honest attempt to reflect genuinely contradictory realities, but a daily bargaining session with an increasingly factionalized public, a corrupted process in which elements of the news become offerings - payments really - in a kind of intellectual extortion.

I've always known that journalists take themselves WAY too seriously, but Wasserman is bordering on delusions of grandeur.

News is entertainment. They have one job, and one job only. That is to keep people glued to the set long enough to sit through the commercials which pay the bills. That's it! The only exception to this is NPR, which even then relies heavily on contributions from "pledge drives", paid sponsors, and of course taxpayer dollars.

Any newsman that tells you they are working for the greater good, or have some grand and glorious responsibility to their viewers is lying. The "fair and balanced" shtick is nothing more than good marketing. For the most part, honesty and fair-mindedness is built in to the system. People don't like to be lied to, and nobody is going to tune in every night at 6 O'clock for the Weekly World News or Dan Rather pawning off bogus 1972 emails about Bush's National Guard Service. This explains why Fox News gets better ratings even though it's available on less TV sets.

Now this is America, and Wasserman can present the news however he chooses. But if he can't hold an audience, what's the point?