LA Times editor John Carroll made a very important speech at the University of Oregon recently.

But since it fell against his industry's fear and the Administration's power, it made no sound.

Carroll spoke against the propaganda of Fox News and other lying liars, and for the tenets of journalism that now seem so quaint, the idea of balance, of giving both sides an equal say, and of looking for truth.

That journalism is obsolete, and Carroll mourned it.

But as I've said many times here, that journalism was short-lived. Men who saw it rise have lived to see if fall.

The idea of journalism as an impartial profession is a 20th century conceit. It was created by the money of such men as Pulitzer and Medill, press barons with few ethics (other than those of the market) who wanted to turn their trade into a profession, so as to maintain their power.

I attended one of the chief products of their "generosity," the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. I have a Masters's of Science in Journalism, from the class of 1978. I majored in magazine.

What I learned there, from people who knew, was that journalism is not a profession. It is a trade, like cooking or construction. You don't do it for the money, because there usually isn't any. You do it because you need to do it, because without it you can't breathe.

So it was for me then, and so it remains.

But the definition of journalism has never been made by journalists. It is a product of the market, a market in which laws rule, and ethics means whatever your lawyer can let you get away with. Journalists see ethics as standing outside law. Businessmen understand its border lies inside law.

If journalists really wish to stand up on their high horse and preach again, they're going to have to earn that right the way Pulitzer and Medill earned that right, in the market.

That is, they're going to have to fight Fox on its own turf, really fight it, using their pages and their time on the air to call them liars and propagandists. They can't do it from the quiet of an academic environment anymore, because there it's easy to ignore.

If the right-wing propaganda machine wants to call journalism, as a profession, a liberal conspiracy, let it. We must be more than that, moreover. We must be their worst nightmare.

If CNN's leaders had an ounce of sense, they would take Fox on directly, call their people liars on the air, trumpet their lies incessantly on their air, and not back down once. They can start by not just following David Brock's new site, but by trumpeting it, and making him their ombudsman.

You don't beat bullies by letting them get away with things, by being "fair," or by trying to see both sides. You beat bullies by punching them in the mouth, leaving them bleeding on the street, and punching them again every time they try to get up, until they run screaming from the fray, because all bullies are, at heart, cowards.

Bill O'Reilly, Rupert Murdoch, Drudge, Limbaugh, all of 'em -- they're cowards. Pound 'em in the chops and you can have your profession back. Nothing else will do.

I guarantee CNN would win big ratings from that. They would also do far more for the profession of journalism than Mr. Carroll can ever do from a campus aerie.