Cambridge, Mass. - Journalism is in serious trouble.

Earlier this year, a jury in Maine accused " Dateline NBC" of "negligence, misrepresentation and emotional distress" and ordered the top-rated network to pay $525,00 in damages to a trucking company. Then, CNN retracted a story alleging the United States use of poison gas against American defectors during the Vietnam War; CEO Tom Johnson said the story contained "serious fault." The Boston Globe fired one of its top columnists for making up people, quotes and situations. In May the New Republic apologized to its readers after discovering one of its associate editors had manufactured stories out of whole cloth. When the Monica Lewinsky story erupted on the national scene, journalists were accused of a string of sins, including the publishing and broadcasting of stories based on highly questionable sourcing, inadequate fact-checking, innuendoes and finger-in-the-wind-guessing.

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