Putting aside whether or not one thinks Cohen, Broder or Hoagland are talented writers or have demonstrated good judgment in their columns, would even their defenders argue that this bunch is ever skeptical of power?

It gets worse. There's Robin "We obsess about clothes" Givhan. And of course there's the hapless Deborah Howell who in her role as the WaPo's ombudsman makes fact free assertions like this:

"Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage -- and that's as it should be. But it's true that The Post, as well as much of the national news media, has written more stories and more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain. Editors have their reasons for this, but conservatives are right that they often don't see their views reflected enough in the news pages. . ."

There are writers at the WaPo who do work that could be deemed to be, in Coll's words, "critical to the republic's health." Former WaPo military correspondent Thomas Ricks is one. Rajiv Chandrasekaran is another. And it's worth noting, too, that Ricks's work questioning the Bush adminstration's claims on WMD prior to the Iraq war were killed by editors or placed in the back of the newspaper. ""The paper was not front-paging stuff," Ricks told Howard Kurtz. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

Ultimately, truly skeptical journalists are rare and they're drowned out by the mass of other journalists at the WaPo who cozy up to elites and whose work actually quite negatively affects the health of "the republic."

One need look no further than WaPo business writer Steven Pearlstein who championed the bailout and upbraided a reader critical of his columns by pointing to his own Pulitzer prize. Unfortunately, the skeptical voices on the bailout were mostly confined to the blogosophere.

And the recent announcement that error-prone progagandist Bill Kristol will write a monthly column only further confirms the WaPo's tilt toward the powerful. Indeed, in announcing the hiring WaPo editorial page editor Fred Hiatt called Kristol "very plugged in."

I don't think that a non profit model is necessarily a bad idea for journalism particularly the sort of investigative journalism that takes a lot of time and money to produce.

But it's ludicrous to describe much of what the WaPo--and the New York Times for that matter--publishes on a daily basis as "critical to the republic’s health." And it's even more absurd to think anyone should fund the sort of journalism that simply mirrors--and feeds into--the very worst practices and behaviors of our republic.