If the media were a politician who had to answer the question every incumbent party dreads “are you better off now than you were eight years ago?” it would be in for a sweeping defeat. And in fact, the media, or the media as we knew it at the beginning of this decade has suffered a sweeping defeat — will we even have newspapers in ten years? Doubtful.

the Washington Post has opted to run another Sarah Palin op-ed piece, this one about Climategate. The piece is a re-working of something Palin posted on her Facebook page last week and the Post is apparently drawing the ire of some readers who feel it’s just a clear grab for traffic.

On this week’s Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz struck back at CNN cohort Lou Dobbs. Earlier in the week, Dobbs claimed that he and his wife had been shot at in their New Jersey home, in part due to the “national liberal media” and its coverage in the immigration debate. Kurtz and guest Margaret Carlson were skeptical.

Is the journalism industry so down at the mouth these days that David Letterman is the only thing standing between it an utter irrelevance? Probably not, but you’d be forgiven for drawing that conclusion based on how much ink the Late Show host’s love life continues to generate. How much more can we read before utter boredom with the ‘scandal’ sets in.

Yesterday, the Washington Post issued Twitter guidelines for employees of the paper. The new rules are actually pretty reasonable: When publishing in any media using your byline, remain impartial. And don’t do anything stupid. But is demanding impartiality in the social media world really in the best interests of the paper?

How do you deal with a summer news slump? Engage in an ongoing debate about semantics with another TV Anchor in hopes that a respected media critic will cover it, then report on said critic taking the bait? If this sounds confusing, we’ll explain out Jon Stewart, Howard Kurtz and Bill O’Reilly all teamed up to set, what we feel to be, an all-time record for media navel gazing. Kudos!

A week or so ago I suggested that the health care debate was a great opportunity for the beleaguered mainstream media — newspapers, network news — to prove “in a slow and deliberate way” it was still relevant. Have they managed to do so in the interim? If they have there’s certainly no evidence of it.

Says Arianna Huffington: “Looking for hidden political agendas in every article and every photo on HuffPost will lead to some very convoluted conclusions. As Freud said, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ — and a nipple slip is just a nipple slip.”