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.