It makes a great deal of difference if you work in an industry that is built on trust. Many reporters have been wrong, and the diligent amongst them will file

It makes a great deal of difference if you work in an industry that is built on trust. Many reporters have been wrong, and the diligent amongst them will file retractions or corrections for their mistakes (and endeavor to make those mistakes few and far between). That contrasts with someone like Jonah Lehrer who was both wrong and mendacious. You can work and have your readers best interests in mind, and be wrong. You can't lie to your readers and have their best interest in mind. Systematic bias within the media, especially when driven by the PR industry is a substantial problem that reporters and editors should contend with, but PG seats the blame almost entirely with journalists, and I think that's at least a little dishonest. There's a market here, and one side is constrained in its resources, human and financial, and the other side has oil companies, tech giants, and lobbyists funneling in billions of dollars. All I'm saying is that as far as analyses go, "journalists are dishonest" may be a convenient narrative, but it's not a very useful or illuminating one (in fact, it sounds like it was written from the perspective of a PR shill :P ).