Will someone please introduce these guys?

If there's any hope for American democracy, it will be because diehards like Bill Moyers and Greg Palast continue doing what they do in spite of being shunned by the mainstream press. Maybe they'd have a better chance of survival if they formed a tag team?

In a way, they did this week. With the Beltway newsies still reeling from Moyers' "Selling the War" broadcast on Wednesday, in today's Los Angeles Times Palast tags in with how decrepit investigative journalism has become in an era of bottom lines and television-shortened attention spans.

As Palast explains, his expose on Tim Griffin and Karl Rove's vote suppression (caging) efforts during the 2004 general election ran in Great Britain, but was all but ignored here.

To the extent that it was ignored in the United States, it wasn't because the report was false. It was because it was complicated and murky and because it required a lot of time and reporting to get to the bottom of it.

[. . .]

The truth is, I knew that a story like this one would never be reported in my own country. Because investigative reporting — the kind Jack Anderson used to do regularly and which was carried in hundreds of papers across the country, the kind of muckraking, data-intensive work that takes time and money and ruffles feathers — is dying.

Seymour Hersh and Robert Parry are among the few investigative reporters left, Palast laments. The rest are too busy covering their access, while newspapers and TV news divisions replace reporting with infotainment and opinion. (And you know what they say about opinions.)

The winners in this process are media investors. The losers are the owners of the public airwaves: you and me.