“Thomas was a reporter, not a journalist,” she writes. “He was a storyteller, not a writer. And he was a damn good newspaperman. … He would do anything for a story – even lie, cheat, and steal – yet he was the most trusted reporter at police headquarters.”

Thomas’s reporting style would be considered dubious by today’s ethical standards, but at the time, his approach to journalism was nothing out of the ordinary. “In the 1940s and ‘50s, newspaper journalism was a cutthroat business,” Miokovic explains. “The creed was, ‘Get it first, get it fast, and (try to) get it right.’”

Today, the emphasis has changed. Accuracy is the usually the first commandment on the framed codes of ethics hanging on newsrooms walls. Further down the list, most codes advise journalists against lying in order to get a story, except under exceptional circumstances. Cheating and stealing? That’s a fireable offence.

But can the timidity of reporters today really be due to a change in ethical standards?

Not according to Barb Palser, who argues in the American Journalism Review that, with their credibility in tatters and critics ready to pounce on the slightest slip-up, journalists just can’t risk sticking their necks out anymore.

“Journalists are in the hot seat,” Palser writes, “their feet held to the flames by citizen bloggers who believe mainstream media are no more trustworthy than the politicians and corporations they cover, that journalists themselves have become too lazy, too cloistered, too self-righteous to be the watchdogs they once were.”

Even if reporters are perfect, even if they get every fact, every quote, every angle to a story just right, they will still face a fight if they dare to challenge power, according to Shlomit Kriger.

In the Ryerson Review of Journalism, Kriger writes: “Pressure groups are gaining power over the media in this age of distrust. … [T]hese groups often reflect only one side of a complex issue.”

Taking on these electronic critics and agenda-driven pressure groups requires a certain kind of temperament, which Keren Ritchie finds in CBC reporter Neil MacDonald. Her profile of the controversial correspondent, aptly titled “Rough, Tough and Ready to Rumble,” depicts him as an intimidating figure who is not afraid to take on critics, because he usually wins.

“He's six-foot-six, with a brawny build, a baritone voice, and a penchant for liberal use of expletives,” Ritchie writes. “Since his start in journalism in the mid-1970s, Macdonald has angered everyone from prime ministers to media moguls to religious communities. … Yet none of it has hurt his career.”

MacDonald’s aggressive and fearless style is rare these days. Most other reporters, by comparison, are downright timid. As Marc Fisher explains in the American Journalism Review, reporters’ voices have been muffled for so long, that he was struck by the sound when they collectively cleared their throats during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Fisher says that, “from ‘Nightline’ to ‘Fox News Sunday,’ from the front pages of the Los Angeles Times to the blogs on the website of New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, reporters got in the faces of the authorities.”

It was a refreshing change, Fisher goes on to say, in an era when reporters are reluctant to challenge authority.

In fact, as Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz points out, the timidity of the press corps has extended so far that its traditional role as a watchdog has been taken over by comedians impersonating journalists.

These days, fake reporters and anchors – like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show’ – are the ones who challenge inconsistencies in politicians’ statements. For example, when U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney denied ever making a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, it was ‘The Daily Show,’ not CNN, that dredged up an old interview from 2001 to prove that Cheney had, in fact, said the link was “pretty well confirmed.”

“So why don’t more working journalists do what Stewart and Colbert are doing?” Kurtz asks. “Perhaps,” Colbert says, ‘there’s a sense that if they engaged in what we do at The Daily Show, they’d be accused of being too aggressive.’”

Colbert continues: “The most common thing that real reporters say to me is, ‘I wish I could say what you say.’ What I don’t understand is, why can’t they say what I say, even in their own way?”

A part of it, at least, is fear. When someone like Rafe Mair – who has made his living as an aggressive muckraker – can be summarily fired, it’s hard to blame other journalists for not rocking the boat.

In "Yanked off the Air", Mair laments the meek nature of the mainstream media, but says it is inevitable given the current climate, where “the bosses censor the media outlets they own by the editors they hire and their editors censor by not hiring shit disturbers in the first place or, if they happen along, letting them know in a hundred little ways what's expected of them.”

“Clearly, we will not have shit disturbers in the mainstream media,” Mair continues. “We will have plenty of clever wordsmiths, poking at the establishment with a jab here and a light smack there, who will only really emerge from the torpor of self-censorship when the story is too big to ignore.”

The decline of aggressive reporting is also due to a decline in the courage of news organizations, according to the editorial board of the Columbia Journalism Review. Compared to the response from former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, who famously said she would go to jail before her reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein when their Watergate notes were subpoenaed, news organizations today show little loyalty to their staff.

When Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper’s notes were recently subpoenaed, Time Inc.’s editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine decided to hand them over without a fight.

The CJR editorial says: “Pearlstine’s decision may have made economic sense for Time Warner shareholders, who presumably have no use for what the judge warned would be a ‘very large’ fine for criminal contempt (it was $1,000 a day; next time it could be $100,000) and no desire to risk alienating allies in the government or roiling the regulatory waters. It’s hard to see, though, how the decision makes journalistic sense, and thus it raises a fundamental question in this age of media conglomerates: Who has journalism’s back?”

The question is particularly salient, given a recent court case in the United States which Eli Lake of The New Republic describes as “unprecedented” when it comes to the implications for free speech.

In August 2004, three people – Lawrence Franklin, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman – were indicted for conspiring “to communicate national defense information ... [to] persons not entitled to receive it.” Franklin was a defence department analyst for the U.S. government, and Rosen and Weissman were lobbyists with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

An indictment of Franklin is not out of the ordinary. Government officials can be charged for leaking secret information, and Franklin pleaded guilty on Oct. 5, 2005. What is disturbing, according to Lake, is that Rosen and Weissman – the ones who sought the secret information – are also being pursued by the court.

Lake writes: “U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty is contending that the lobbyists are legally no different than the government officials they lobbied, holding Rosen and Weissman to the same rules for protecting secrets as Franklin or any other bureaucrat with a security clearance.”

“But, if it's illegal for Rosen and Weissman to seek and receive ‘classified information,’” Lake continues, “then many investigative journalists are also criminals – not to mention former government officials who write for scholarly journals or the scores of men and women who petition the federal government on defense and foreign policy.”

There are many reasons, it seems, for journalists to shy away from confrontation these days. But that just emphasizes the need for reporters to become bolder and braver. Despite biased media critics, a lack of support from news organizations, the looming threat of being fired and encroachment from the courts, journalists have an obligation not to be intimidated. As its first imperative, the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics states: “Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.”