What kind of journalism do they do at Newsweek?

The apologists for the MSM keep telling me that professional journalists are a necessary bulwark to freedom and good government. We can count on them (and only them) to call the mighty to account.

That is pretty hard to reconcile with this confession by Evan Thomas:

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he's wrong, and you sense he's being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see. By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence, as Liaquat Ahamed has shown in "Lords of Finance," his new book about the folly of central bankers before the Great Depression, and David Halberstam revealed in his Vietnam War classic, "The Best and the Brightest."

That helps to explain why insiders like Jamie Gorelick get a pass from prestigious journalists.

Evan Thomas produced one of the most memorable lines from the Duke lacrosse case. He tried to explain why Newsweek and the rest of the MSM ended up with egg on their face after they rushed to convict the lacrosse team in 2006.

We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.

Here most of us plebes thought getting the facts right was Job #1 for journalists. Apparently we were naive.

Thomas's quote in context is even more damning:

"We fell into a stereotype of the Duke lacrosse players," says Newsweek's Evan Thomas. "It's complicated because there is a strong stereotype [that] lacrosse players can be loutish, and there's evidence to back that up. There's even some evidence that that the Duke lacrosse players were loutish, and we were too quick to connect those dots."

But he adds: "It was about race. Nifong's motivations clearly were rooted in his need to win black votes. There were tensions between town and gown, that part was true. The narrative was properly about race, sex and class... We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place... We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong."

If the facts are wrong, though, why explore the narrative at all? Is it fair to use the Duke lacrosse players to tell a larger story of athletes run wild--a theme that appeared not only on sports pages but also was splashed, repeatedly, on the front pages of major newspapers and amplified on cable shoutfests? Says Johnson: Once the facts are "proven not to be true, you certainly have to consider whether the narrative is relevant."

Gee, the MSM has lectured us for decades that USING STEREOTYPES IS WRONG! Yet here we see Thomas trying to defend his rag by explaining that they relied on stereotypes instead of digging for facts. I guess that is all part of the nuanced thinking that the Big Brains of the Big Media get paid for.

Or, just maybe, the MSM is trapped by their knowingness and the limits of their education.