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Journalists like to claim that they are devoted to transparency, but it's striking how so many of them exempt themselves and their own media outlets from those "principles." Here are five recent, somewhat similar episodes illustrating that syndrome:

Media outlets lose credibility when they demand accountability from others while refusing to provide it themselves

Lahore : Khawaja Khalid Farooq I.G.Punjab talking to media.

Imran Kahn talking to media.

Disgraced royal correspondent Clive Goodman's letter says phone hacking was 'widely discussed' at NoW meetings * Read Clive Goodman's letter to News International

The hand-wringing and spinning has commenced in full force now in the wake of the riot which gripped the downtown core after the Canucks Game 7 loss. The narrative which emerged, both in the media and thanks to public statements by the Vancouver Police, is that-are you ready for it?-anarchists are to blame.

SOPA is everywhere on the Internet and nowhere on the nightly news. End the #SOPA blackout: http://bit.ly/AhLufP

To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone"

In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled waterboarding as "torture" for almost 100 years until the Bush administration told them not to, The New York Times issued a statement justifying this behavior on the ground that it did not want to take sides in the debate. Andrew Sullivan, Greg Sargent and Adam Serwer all pointed out that "taking a side" is precisely what the NYT did: by dutifully complying with the Bush script and ceasing to use the term (replacing it with cleansing euphemisms), it endorsed the demonstrably false proposition that waterboarding was something other than torture. Yesterday, the NYT's own Brian Stelter examined this controversy and included a justifying quote from the paper's Executive Editor, Bill Keller, that is one of the more demented and reprehensible statements I've seen from a high-level media executive in some time (h/t Jay Rosen):

Through education, media, and big business, your mind is being controlled. Your mind is distracted with illusions to keep you away from the truth. Reason why America is dumbed down.

Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com

Ten years ago, when we first focused national attention on the dangers of the US media cartel, the situation was already grim, although in retrospect it may seem better than it really was. In the spring of 1996 Fox News was only a conspiracy (which broke a few months later). CNN belonged to Turner Broadcasting, which hadn't yet been gobbled by Time Warner (although it would be just a few months later); Viacom had not yet bought CBS News (although it would in 1999, before they later parted ways); and, as the Telecommunications Act had been passed only months earlier, local radio had not yet largely disappeared from the United States (although it was obviously vanishing). One could still somewhat plausibly assert, as many did, that warnings of a major civic crisis were unfounded, overblown or premature, as there was little evidence of widespread corporate censorship, and so we were a long way from the sort of journalistic meltdown that The Nation had predicted.

The popular cultural representation of the U.S. media is that they are adversarial to, and independent of, state and corporate power. This well cultivated and consciously promoted image quickly dissolves under the lens of scrutiny.

An analysis by Harvard students reveals that the press has shifted torture standards and even language on command

" I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world -- in the field of advertizing -- and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours. " a Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.

Hucksters continue to masquerade as journalists under FCC and FTC 'enforcement.'