Tim Rutten

This era is like no other in American journalism: People are consuming more news than ever before, but they're also far more critical of its purveyors than they've ever been.

For the first time in living memory, the Anti-Defamation League is sounding the alarm about a mainstream media personality: Fox News' Glenn Beck, who also hosts a popular radio show.

The US newspaper industry needs help. It could come from the government in the form of a antitrust exemption that would allow all US newspaper companies -- and others in the English-speaking world, as well as popular broadcast-based sites such as CNN.com -- to sit down and negotiate an agreement on how to scale prices and, then, to begin imposing them simultaneously.