America's love affair with the traditional news media is steeped in nostalgic moments: there is the first moon landing, the 24/7 news coverage of the President Kennedy assassination, and Bernstein and Woodward's exposé of the Watergate scandal. In past decades, millions of Americans started each morning started with a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other, and the commute to work kept faces buried in the headlines and op-ed pieces of major rags.

But traditional news organizations are now in sharp decline. Their audiences are shrinking; they face vigorous new competitors like blogs, cable, and talk radio; and they have endured scandals like fake news and counterfeit sources. And while such problems have become chronic in the industry, perhaps no issue has eroded consumer confidence like the debate over media bias and the question of fairness.

A recent UCLA study titled "A Measure of Media Bias" published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that almost all major media outlets tilt to the left. While the groundbreaking study was the first of its kind, its conclusions are corroborated by other research, such as data showing that a significant majority of reporters and editors align their personal political views with Democratic Party.

Journalistic bias turned scandalous during the 2004 presidential campaign when CBS News anchor Dan Rather delivered a potentially election-swaying report based upon spurious, unauthenticated documents--a misstep that led to executive firings and Rather's early retirement from CBS. Unfortunately, the CBS blunder was not an isolated event. The New York Times suffered its own credibility crisis when revelations surfaced that columnist Jayson Blair routinely fabricated and plagiarized news stories.

But the failing of traditional news media is about more than Dan Rather's inauthentic memo scandal or fabricated news stories in the New York Times. Increasingly, it's about layoffs. The nation's most prestigious print-media organizations--from Time magazine and the Washington Post to The Los Angeles Times--have been hit with big cuts to newsroom and editorial staff, and the recent sale of Knight Ridder continues to spark questions over whether the ink-on-print business model is still viable in a digital age. It may be premature to pronounce the death of traditional news media, but most observers agree that the industry lies in a terminal state.