The court jester may be the most misunderestimated figure in the medieval pantheon. (You can look like this for just $225 from Fashionsintime.)

It’s said his role was to sit at the King’s shoulder and remind him of his mortality. The role is played today entirely for laughs. But the jester was also the first free press. For his japes to hit home they had to bite. They had to tell the truth, and skirt that dangerous line between truth-telling and sedition. Laughter got the medicine down.

The role was vital, because Kings who didn’t hear the other side, or who refused to listen, could become deluded. They would over-reach and fall, hard, losing not just their own lives but those of their families and all their worldly goods. “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” Without a conscience, a King was just a tyrant and had no legitimacy.

Journalism plays this role today. Journalists must be the conscience of their time. But jesting is in eclipse. Art Buchwald has gone into semi-retirement , and his successors, Trudeau and O’Rourke, are seen as biased by the “other side,” so their wit doesn’t bite.

What’s worse is the (mostly conservative) delusion that lack of bias means bias, thus bias is unbiased, and truth is what you get away with. Fox’ slogan “Fair and Balanced” is pure propaganda, a complete falsehood. Yet millions of people, including most of the current Administration, insist on believing the lie is true, and believing that anything told by unbiased sources is, thus, a lie.

It’s this corruption of the press that may be the most dangerous act of our time, the last straw that causes our downfall. Consider that in 1991 CNN provided coverage of the First Gulf War to the whole world, including the Arab world. Under Ted Turner the network was always careful to avoid propaganda, and it was respected for that. But now the torch has passed, in the Middle East, to networks like Al-Jazeera. Call it what names you will, and call me names for mentioning it if you like. But the fact is that in the Muslim world they’re believed, and CNN is not.

The propagandization of the American press has also caused the Administration to assume it can do anything, to anyone, and get away with it. The view that the Abu Ghraib horror was created by “the press,” that “the press” is to blame for the resulting uproar, is widespread. I read it this morning, not from an expected source, but from Annette Johnson (pictured), a black female journalism professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta. “It may cost lives,” she wrote.

Yes, it may. But if we do evil, we must pay for it. Just as when anyone else does evil. If we refuse to pay, if we see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, then I guarantee you that greater evil will be done, maybe to you, and who will hear your screams then?

Evil rises when good men do nothing. It takes courage to call people on it, because the whistleblower suffers doubly. But without whistleblowers, the distance between Bush and Hitler is only what their own conscience deems necessity, and that can be a very short trip in any man.