Do they teach anything useful in journalism school? I don't know about that, but it seems to me that journalism itself is becoming less useful every day, largely because of the things being spilled by Mr. Weigel. One of the easier conclusions to be drawn from the uniformity of slant and the clique mentality of the D.C. press is this:

Nobody told me this in journalism school. Seriously, though, nobody did! The fact that one part of journalism in Washington was a give-and-take of gossip, and that sources learned to trust one another by bitching about people and projects they didn’t like; . . .

There never seems to be a thought given as to why the founders felt it was important to have a free press. They could only protect it from the power of the state. From the power of Academia and its own groupthink, it should protect itself. All the coziness, drinking together, self-righteousness and peer pressure is a danger that news organizations themselves ought to guard against. It's just as easy to lose one's independence to social pressures as it is to government control, probably much easier.