What goes around comes around.

For decades employed journalists have considered themselves a class apart. Charged by their employers with deciding what was relevant, they took fame and turned it to infamy, often violating confidences, and said they were just doing their jobs.

They ignored the concentration of power in their own business -- a journalist is someone who works for someone (who buys ink by the barrel, spectrum by the megahertz, bandwidth by the terabyte) -- and expected a legal shield to protect them and no one else.

Well, uh-uh. No more. And Thank God.

The era of corporate journalism was an aberration, lasting perhaps a century. Before Hearst and Pulitzer were able to start a war over Cuba, journalists were small businessmen, or rank amateurs. They accepted the risks of opprobrium , of having their copyright stolen and their presses destroyed. They risked death to tell the truth.

Today editors like Eason Jordan have 7-figure salaries and walk among the rich and famous as equals. Speaking as a long-time journalist I say this is wrong. Broadcasters have "gone native" with the people they cover, attaining the same notoreity and respect simply for climbing corporate ladders.

So now they are being treated as they have treated their subjects. Their confidences are being violated. They are being held up to scrutiny, even ridicule. Every story they approve is being questioned, sometimes rudely. Their authority is being diminished.

Good. Because the final authority should be you, the reader, the viewer, the audience. If you can be as skeptical about your newsreaders as you are of your politicians, your sports stars, and your entertainers, who really has any right to complain?

Of course as with any revolution this one eats its young. Matt Drudge is a fairy. Andrew Sullivan is an a-hole. Glenn Reynolds is a fascist. Doc Searls is a...someone will think of something which may or may not be true.

The point is we're all fair game. (Blankenhorn is a self-important little nobody.) And we all should be fair game. Anyone in this business who thinks they stand above it all, or should, needs to get out of the kitchen.

Because they're going to get burned.