Discovery channels: in the marketplace, truth is always a hot commodity.

• Author: Henderson, Rick

The New Republic fires Associate Editor Stephen Glass after discovering he invented sources and subjects for more than two dozen stories he wrote for the magazine. The Boston Globe dismisses columnist Patricia Smith after finding out she also created fictional characters to deliver polemical messages in her "reporting" about life on the streets. CNN and Time make a dramatic public apology and retraction - and fire two producers - after jointly airing and publishing stories alleging that the U.S. military used nerve gas on American deserters in Vietnam.

Prestige press outlets have taken some serious body blows over the past few months. And media critics have quickly fingered the cause of these missteps: capitalism - or more precisely, the lust to capture readers and viewers in a hypercompetitive marketplace.

In the Los Angeles Times, former CBS and NBC reporter Marvin Kalb, now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, blames "profit-centered, business-oriented news" and the "24-hour-a-day news cycle with nonstop demands for 'profitable news.' "In Intellectualcapital.com, media critic Eric Alterman faults the "culture of celebrity worship" and "the notion that the actual information in any given story is less important than the entertainment package it helps create." Wired's Jon Katz complains that "the business of journalism has become dominated by large conglomerates whose only interest is profits, who have no ideology other than mass marketing."

Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst must be cackling from their graves. A century ago, the two icons of contemporary prestige journalism drove the nation into a frenzy - and a war with Spain - with their sensationally exaggerated accounts of Spanish oppression in Cuba. Their goal was to sell newspapers with what became known as yellow journalism. From the colonial pamphleteers who fomented revolution against the British to the frontier editors who would publish any slander to sell papers (as recounted in Mark Twain's hilarious early story "Journalism in Tennessee"), "newspapermen" and broadcasters have always sought bigger audiences and fatter profits by offering information and entertainment.

The current controversies are different in one important way: The competitive processes of today's marketplace led to the rapid exposure and resolution of these journalistic shenanigans. Rather than denigrate capitalism and the search for profits, media critics should praise market...