Jack Shafer, writing on Slate, about recent high profile plagiarism.

I'm as delighted as the next press critic or blogger to catch journalists making things up, plagiarizing, taking bribes or giving them, deliberately libeling people, blackmailing people, lying to sources, or forging documents. I approve when newspapers and broadcasters assign internal reports or external investigations to get to the root cause of the perfidy. But I think the profession needlessly exhausts itself trying to figure out why journalists misbehave. You might as well as ask why people cheat and steal.

Bad journalism, I fear, is a necessary byproduct of good journalism. Unlike the legal and medical professions, no guild or licensing board exists to prevent people from penning opinion columns or articles. This free entry means that nobody need present a credential if they want to spout off or report a piece or pursue a journalism career. The more authoritarian a society, the more likely it is to license journalists.

So let me see if I got this right. We can't regulate morality, but instead must let people make their own mistakes, while we rely on competition, reputational capital, and consumer discretion to monitor quality of public discourse. Sounds pretty good. So a humble question: is what's good for journalism good for the rest of private society?