I apologize for any personal offense taken. None was intended. You, after all, introduced Naomi Wolf rather than yourself in conclusion to a comment  describing an apparent evolution in the industry. Subsequently, I find myself replying to a paradox.

For redstar's commentary invited discussion of socially-acceptable standards --as opposed to technical standards-- of journalistic craft. In that context, yes, I do have a problem with deference to Naomi Wolf rather than yourself in modeling political economy of investigation that is sustained by "professional" journalists and bloggers today. Can you not find the irony in the use of this quote to herald a "new society":

We don't necessarily distinguish between politics and policy, or activism and journalism, and we don't pretend that there is an above the fray and an 'in the muck'. Most of all, we respect ideas because ideas, when implemented, have immense power. Ideas matter. Conservative ideas have affected us personally, whether it was growing up in a suburb or having no health care insurance. And to the extent that you create ideas or appropriate ideas and organize around them, you can build a new society. That's what the right did, which is why we respect the right.

Would that originality were my only criterion by which to judge the differences between "new society" and the old, I should quite relieved to find new ideas replicated in the new broadcast media. But it is not. The originality that I seek in the métier of the people's "press" is evidence that the people have discovered new skills, that the very institutional structures --the knowledge base and commerce-- on which it is founded is found useless. I don't see that occuring wherever I find glib manifestos that "appropriate" ideas or "organize" political intelligence around media "credentials" or gloss the inherent disorder of distributed "authority." I see instead consolidating, promotional activity of a new vanguard.

So, no, I would not immediately characterize any reconsideration of Neuman as "invalid." (Thank you for the link; I haven't visit in a while.) But I cannot apologize for presuming The End of America is another link in a chain of lengthy non sequiturs known as US journalism.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.