NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen and political journalist and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald explain to Bill Moyers that the press, once seen as an agent for change — the "fourth estate" checking power in America — has become thoroughly enmeshed in the establishment, and has a vested interest in preserving it. Jay Rosen explains:

Well, what cannot be considered is that there could be anything radically wrong with Washington. That the entire institution could be broken. That there are new rules necessary. That idea, that the institutions of Washington have failed and need to be changed, doesn't really occur to the press, because they're one of those institutions.

The Internet enables people to construct their own platforms and to attract like-minded people. [...] So that now there are gathering places of hundreds of thousands, if not more citizens, who are just as angry, just as dissatisfied and just as intent on circumventing these institutions, shaming them into changing as well, in order to force the change that they themselves so vigorously resist. And I think there's a cause for optimism in that regard.

In July 2006 he launched NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. The first one was called Assignment Zero, a collaboration with Wired.com. A second project is OfftheBus.Net with the Huffington Post.

In 1999, Yale University Press published his book, WHAT ARE JOURNALISTS FOR?, about the rise of the civic journalism movement. Rosen wrote and spoke frequently about civic journalism (also called public journalism) over a ten-year period, 1989-99. From 1993 to 1997 he was the director of the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation.

As a press critic and reviewer, he has published in THE NATION, COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, NEWSDAY and others. Online he has written for SALON.COM, TOMPAINE.COM and POYNTER.ORG. In 1990 he and Neil Postman hosted a radio show on WBAI in New York called "The Zeitgeist Hour." Rosen is also a member of the Wikipedia Advisory Board.

Greenwald began his blog October, 2005 and it quickly became one of the most widely read on the Internet. With a daily readership in excess of 100,000, and ranked in Technorati's Top 50 most-cited blogs, Greenwald has become one of the web's most influential political writers, with one of the Internet's largest and most loyal readerships. In September, 2008, NEW YORK MAGAZINE named him one of America's 40 most popular and widely-cited political pundits.

His work has been cited by numerous members of Congress and in Congressional reports; his journalism has been credited by THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES and multiple other publications; and he has regularly appeared on THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW, DEMOCRACY NOW with Amy Goodman, various NPR and C-SPAN shows, and numerous other shows.

Published February 6, 2009.