Not long ago, veteran newsman and professor of journalism Edward Wasserman spoke of how difficult it was to get the story straight when journalists were censored by Saddam Hussein:

For the news audience, a moreenduring question concerns the unacknowledged compromises that journalists make, routinely and invisibly -- with sources, publicists, apparatchiks, whose connivance is indispensable to the news process, and whose approval has indisputably more impact than the public's.

To what degree are you, as reader or viewer, the person to whom the news is truly intended -- or are you eavesdropping on another transaction? When does news become currency, with the news organization purchasing what it needs with generous and judicious reporting? The notion of programming as payment isn't new. Marshall McLuhan suggested that TV shows are the payoff viewers get for watching advertisements.

For a TV journalist, the public is vague and amorphous: Viewers won't scrutinize every reference to Hussein to determine if it's respectful. But censors will. Their jobs -- and perhaps their lives -- depend on it. So when do they become the primary audience for which the message is crafted?

Unfortunately, the conditions under which CNN operated in Iraq aren't so different, in their essentials, from those that many reporters face. So they tailor their reporting to sustain their access to the sources they need.

The public is wedded to the absurd belief that journalists pillage their sources. Reporters are far more likely to coddle, flatter and pander to them. Even when they're monsters.

Now that the Saddam Hussein threat is dead, Wasserman (in a column from my local newspaper titled "Newsrooms under seige") focuses on a new kind of monster, and I'm wondering if he thinks bloggers are the new Saddam Hussein.

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.

Implicit in Wasserman's piece is that those who decide what to report should not be accountable to anyone, and that criticism which leads to a fear of "scrutiny" is a form of censorship.

Criticism is precisely the opposite of censorship. Just as Wasserman can call bloggers a "free-floating cadre of rightist warriors," bloggers have just as much right to answer back.

Speaking of scrutiny, Glenn Reynolds discussed Wasserman's column too, and he links to these accounts which document a particularly notorious example of lying and deceptive reporting by Knight-Ridder.

According to Wasserman, such attempts to correct such lies and deception constitute intimidation and censorship.

I'm not buying that -- any more than I buy the idea that disagreement with bigotry constitutes religious persecution.

MORE: Via Glenn Reynolds, I was tickled -- pink -- to see pictures of nice pigs finishing last. (Personally, I think they look like a "free floating cadre of rightist warriors," but I'm not in the business of censorship....)

QUESTION: Who comes up with slogans like "free floating cadre of rightist warriors" anyway? Was it really Wasserman? Or is Spiro Agnew still alive?