Newspapers Good and Bad

David Carr of the NYT finds a nugget of hope in the News of the World scandal:

Still, how did we find out that a British tabloid was hacking thousands of voice mails of private citizens? Not from the British government, with its wan, inconclusive investigations, but from other newspapers... 

Newspapers, it turns out, are still powerful things, and not just in the way that Mr. Murdoch has historically deployed them. The Guardian stayed on the phone-hacking story like a dog on a meat bone, acting very much in the British tradition of a crusading press, and goosing the story back to life after years of dormancy...

Mr. Murdoch, ever the populist, prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact -- an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist -- can have a profound effect. 

His corporation may be able to pick governments, but holding them accountable is also in the realm of newspaper journalism, an earnest concept of public service that has rarely been of much interest to him.

A newspaperman insisting newspapers are still relevant, perhaps.  I am hopeful and uplifted nonetheless.

Thanks, TNC