In his latest piece, ABC News columnist Michael Malone absolutely skewers the mainstream media for debasing and corrupting a once-honorable profession: Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and Pensions.

The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game.� With�its readers, with the Constitution, and with�its own fate.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling.� And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living.� A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me.� I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut.� I am a fourth generation newspaperman.� As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kansas during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).� My hard-living - and when I knew her, scary - grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times.� And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer.� I’ve spent thirty years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor.� And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national by-line before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist”, you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.