"A series of revelations of corporate malpractice and number fiddling" have destroyed investor faith in Wall Street, reports the Economist. "Investors have not only lost patience with corporate America's greed and its inability to do what it says it is doing; they have also lost confidence in Wall Street's ability to act as an honest broker between them, the providers of capital, and the corporate users of it.

Ben Fritz of Spinsanity.org analyzes the rhetoric in a recent New York Post column by John Podhoretz, who "frames the entire debate ... as a crude either-or proposition: we're either fighting ourselves or we're fighting the terrorists. ... Podhoretz would do well to remember, however, that questioning the performance of our government is not an act of treason. It's part of the process of open debate that is central to American democracy."

Tom Fox, publisher of the National Catholic Reporter, explains why it took more than a decade before journalists exposed the Catholic priest sex scandal. "We were seeing cases of this pedophilia stuff in a number of dioceses in a number of cities," Fox says. "The secular press wouldn't touch it because they didn't want to be seen as anti-Catholic, and the Catholic [press] wouldn't touch it because they weren't independent."