Is journalism failing again?

Howard Owens worries here about the lack of skepticism in reporting on the market bail-out legislation. His points ought to raise concerns and evoke some pondering amongst all of us who were discouraged by the wide-spread failure of accountability reporting in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Worth a read.

Here's the lead:

In the days prior today’s bailout vote, you could surf through Google news and find any number of stories that told us that the U.S. economy is in a crisis, and that spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street bankers was unavoidable.

Or you could turn on the television and watch just about any news show and hear the same thing.

What you rarely found or heard was any serious questioning of whether the crisis was anywhere near the proportion George W. Bush said it was, or if the bailout was really necessary, or if the bailout would work, or if, maybe, the bailout might make things actually worse.