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Back in the day, when I was a young television producer, the conventional wisdom was that citizens — yes, we were citizens, not yet consumers — couldn't care less about how the news business worked. That, veterans told me, was "inside baseball."

Having come to TV from newspaper reporting, though, I was fascinated by differences between news in print and on screen. That led to deeper questions. How did journalism work? Why pursue it?

Then I got lucky. In 1968, executives at National Educational Television green-lighted my proposal to cover a Vietnam War protest and examine how the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC-TV News and United Press International did.

After putting their stories under the microscope, we interviewed folks like David Brinkley, Clifton Daniel of the Times and Bill Moyers, then publisher of Newsday and concluded — ahem — each outfit had an angle that shaped its story.

That was controversial stuff, then and now, but my boss' boss, Fred Friendly, thought the experiment worthwhile.

It was a time for self-examination. As the whole world watched tumultuous events like the Democratic convention in Chicago, the commercial networks, too, aired documentaries about how their cameras intersected with public events.

This was the '60s, when newspapers routinely criticized TV news, a wild, crazy and educational era.

No more. Today's television doesn't explore the inner tube. Today's papers rarely treat TV seriously or — aside from a few major newspapers with ombudsmen — reveal their own dynamics.

That retreat is bad news for democracy.

When Newsweek employs Karl Rove as a contributor, for example, why not discuss what that brilliant, unscrupulous political operative will do for journalism?

The New York Times just hired William Kristol as a regular columnist. Adding neo-conservative op-eds makes sense, but why pick the epitome of geopolitical ignorance?

Kristol, remember, told National Public Radio shortly after we attacked Iraq: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America, that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."

In both hires, analysis might start with the premise they were corporate decisions, not journalistic. Businesses defend themselves with balance, which isn't truth-telling.

The paucity of mainstream criticism of our news mediums might explain why even educated Americans — leftists and rightists — scapegoat "the media" as if "media" was a singular noun and a single institution.

No, and no. Reality is more complex.

Broadcasting needs attention, too. The Republican majority on the Federal Communications Commission just voted to further centralize media power. Will corporate Democrats reverse that? Don't bet on it.

Perhaps media criticism isn't a top national priority, but it's hardly trivial. For the fundamental bias in both print and broadcasting is to duck First Amendment responsibilities, simplify and dumb down. This encourages feeling and discourages thought. It empowers the Establishment, plutocrats and theocrats who have, in recent years, dishonored our nation abroad and subverted the Constitution, imperiling democracy.

In retrospect, the seniors who pooh-poohed my youthful desire to think out loud about our news mediums were wrong. Audiences gobbled up "inside baseball."

Newspapers are losing readers today. Network and local TV news are losing viewers. Young people, bored by traditional fare, instead read the Web, which brims with media criticism.

I doubt that's entirely coincidental.