Here is a suggestion that might change the landscape of reporting for the better...
In some kinds of financial reporting, the reporter is required by the SEC to inform the reader if he/she owns any stock in the company on which he/she is reporting. Then the reader has the opportunity to decide for themselves if the reporting is influenced by the reporter's vested interest in the story.
Since journalistic impartiality is a myth (on both sides of the aisle), I believe that journalistic standards taught at journalism schools ought to require reporters to reveal their party affiliation whenever they report on political matters, instead of teaching the myth of impartiality to which nobody pays any attention. It needs to be nothing more than an italicized remark in parentheses at the bottom of an article stating "(Mr./Ms. Doe is a registered member of the X party.)."
That simple sentence at the bottom of any article on political reporting would do more to force impartiality accountability on the reporters than any ethics taught in J-school. And by not making it a legal requirement but instead an ethical one, then we can automatically discount any article that does not have that tagline as fraudulent reporting and ignore it. In fact, we can then leave it to the blogosphere - both left and right - to point out the unethical omissions.
I worked in a major city newspaper newsroom for 9 years. Registered independents in the newsroom are as rare as registered republicans, so I know for a certain fact that claims to the contrary are a bald-faced lie. It would not stretch truth to say that 80% or more of reporters are democrats. As democrats, they have a vested interest in reporting the world as they see it through their democrat paradigm. That's fine. I actually don't have a problem with slanted reporting. Heck, I'm slanted. What I have a problem with is the passing off of that reporting as impartial when it is patently not so by any objective standard.
So, require political reporters to reveal their party affiliation at all times, or be known as a fraud who is not to be trusted. Then, readers can still read a broad array of reporting (we all should) representing different viewpoints and come to their own conclusions about what is truth, but they will be doing so from an informed position.
I just don't see any other way to restore respectability to the profession.
