Keller @ Large: What Do You Want From Your News Media?

BOSTON (CBS) - Here's a question for you – what do you want from your news media?

In print, broadcast and on the web, we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure that out, and the messages you send us aren't always easy to interpret.

For instance, I bet most of us would say we want fairness and truth in our news coverage, if not balance. But then we get hate mail because we're allegedly too hard on your favorite pol or cause and not tough enough on the ones you hate.

Which is it? And do fairness and truth mean the same thing to all?

I always thought that the role of the press was to – as the 19th century humorist Finley Peter Dunne put it - "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

That means you go to bat for the powerless and voiceless, and take a bat to the pretensions and greed of the ruling classes.

Not every journalist ascribes to that mandate, but every real journalist does.

There's always been plenty of room for fluff in the media. I freely admit that funny video of water-skiing squirrels and rhesus monkeys riding dogs dressed up as jockeys helped put my sons through college, and I make no apology for it.

But it seems as if you want more and more fluff as time goes on, and less coverage of the real world.

Is that true?

I started brooding about all this because of depressing testimony at a State House hearing Tuesday on the need to toughen the public records law, which bureaucrats and pols routinely ignore in part because they figure you don't care enough about having an aggressive press to protest when it is neutered by scofflaws in power.

I guess I'm wondering - are they right?

Listen to Jon's commentary:

You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.