Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post offers "Frayed Thread in a Free Society" (link), an attempt to blame the problems the mainstream media is having not on the MSM itself but on its uninformed and misled readers. And, Rush Limbaugh is one of those misleading people about the MSM.

The biggest challenge facing America's struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry... There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it... But the greater truth is that newspaper reporters, editors and institutions are responsible for the boots-on-the-ground grub work that produces the news stories and performs the government watchdog role so crucial to a democratic republic... Unfortunately, the chorus of media bashing from certain quarters has succeeded in convincing many Americans that they don't need newspapers... A younger generation, meanwhile, has little understanding or appreciation of the relationship between a free press and a free society.

She's obviously right about the fact that we need a free press. The problem is that the MSM is not providing that. Instead, during the last election the MSM acted as little more than an arm of the Obama campaign: lying and misleading for him and smearing and lying about his opponents. See for instance the Sarah Palin smear page, with about a couple dozen examples of the campaign the MSM waged against her with several of those involving the WaPo.