In place of the old healthy skepticism, we have arrogant cynicism. The highest echelons of the media and government became preserves for America's most-privileged. An Ivy League degree was the ticket to a reporting job on a major daily. And incest produced the usual ugly results.

"Mainstream" newspapers lost touch with American workers because the new breed of journalists didn't know any workers.

After journalists became matinee idols, every bright young reporter had a new career goal. Forget honest, get-at-the-facts reporting. Henceforth the crowning ambition in the field was to bring down a president -- especially one who wasn't "our kind." Failing that, turning the tide of a foreign conflict against Washington would do.

"Serious" journalists became scandal-mongers in drag.

The other product of the Woodward-Bernstein cult was the rise of the self-adoring conviction that journalists were above patriotism, the law and common decency. Today's Joe McCarthys aren't on Capitol Hill -- they're in the newsroom. In lieu of Edward R. Murrow, we have Hedda Hopper masquerading as Joan of Arc.

Now we learn that Bob Woodward, the muckraker who became a groupie to the great, felt himself entitled to ignore his basic responsibilities as a citizen and journalist in the CIA leak case: He had information and withheld it from investigators.

His counterpart at the New York Times, Judy Miller (the loudest diva since Maria Callas), invoked the journalist's exception to the rule of law in the opposite manner, grandstanding about protecting her source.

Leona Helmsley famously remarked that taxes are for the little people. Star journalists assume that the law is for the little people, too. "Journalistic privilege" is the biggest crock of merde since phrenology or eugenics: Reporters aren't priests in the confessional: They're citizens, just like you and me.

Celeb journalists love to invoke "freedom of the press," but dismiss the reality that the exercise of freedom in an open society demands a corresponding sense of responsibility, as well as self-restraint and mature judgment.

The coverage of Iraq by once-great publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker has been nothing more than a propaganda effort to convince the American people that our efforts are destined to fail. Stories lie by omission and manipulation.

Patriotism? Forget it.

After Watergate, patriotism became an embarrassment among journalists. They're "citizens of the world." CNN International has grown so casually anti-American that it rivals the BBC, while much of big media here at home gives terrorist atrocities a pass, while celebrating the slightest errors of our troops with front-page headlines.

The Washington Post -- the old home of Woodward and Bernstein -- offers a fascinating study in the tensions at work in journalism today. Its editorial page has improved remarkably in recent years, while the quality of its general reporting has far surpassed the Times' page one editorializing.

Yet the quest for headlines-at-any-cost and the sense that evident patriotism is distasteful led a superb paper to shameful decisions. Dana Priest, a journalist with much fine work to her credit, recently broke the story of secret CIA arrangements to hold captured terrorists in Eastern Europe. For the sake of a headline, the paper did severe harm to our counter-terror efforts and our diplomatic relations.

The editors would insist that "the public has a right to know." That tired mantra needs scrutiny: It would have justified revealing secrets such as Ultra, the Manhattan Project or the timing of D-Day in the Second World War.

Our country is at war with implacable enemies. If the media disdain supporting our efforts at self-defense, they should at least refrain from undercutting our security. How many deaths is a story worth? (And imagine if we had published daily casualty reports from World War II battlefields. Would "journalistic integrity" have justified aiding Hitler)?

Another Washington Post reporter, Anthony Shadid, published a long string of soft-on-the-insurgents columns. An Arabic-speaker with family roots in the Middle East, Shadid was apparently such a vital asset to the paper that his work never got the scrubbing it deserved.

This year, Shadid published a book, "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War." Turn to the index. In 424 pages that pretend to describe the suffering of "Iraq's people" under American occupation, there are only nine entries under "Kurds" -- when Kurds are about a fifth of the population. Kurdish success and pro-Americanism would have been inconvenient.

Media bias just might turn the future of Iraq into a disaster that will reverberate for decades. Last week, The Washington Post interviewed Sunni-insurgent sympathizers. They said they "loved" media-creation Cindy Sheehan and took heart from reports of the anti-war movement in Washington.

There you have it, from the camel's mouth.

As vile as Richard Nixon was, I'm no longer certain that Woodward and Bernstein did our country a service. The post-Watergate journalist's unexamined conviction that he or she is "beyond good and evil" has done far more evil than good.

Actions have consequences. Today's journalists refuse to accept that the rule applies to them. The wages of irresponsible journalism are death -- for others. Expose a crucial clandestine operation, shatter a policy or wreck a struggling state, and you get a Pulitzer Prize. The motto of journalists today is "Nothing's ever our fault."

The republic suffers.

Cross-posted at the American Daughter Media Center.