What if journalists were painted with the same weary skepticism they brush over others? You don’t have to imagine. Earlier this week former Federal Communications Commission member Harold Furchtgott-Roth (crazy name etc.), previewed a conference on media reform at Columbia’s J-School. Before your eyelids snap firmly shut, here’s a little outside perspective on us as journalists – a little dose of the medicine we’re used to dishing out to others:

Conference attendees should be entertained by the sight of journalists reviewing a public-policy issue self-consciously from the perspective of journalists. For professionals who often champion detached objectivity, introspection is awkward. If a policy is good for society but bad for journalists, is it any less worthy? Conversely, if a policy is bad for society but good for journalists, can it have any merit? And if a policy is bad for society, is it any worse merely because it is bad for journalists?

Part of the American public seems to idealize a time when Walter Cronkite, the conference’s keynote speaker, was watched by a third or more of American households on a daily basis. Paradoxically, those are now widely deemed the “good old days” for press and broadcast ownership. Today, when Americans have choices of countless sources of news from Al Jazeera to the China Daily, and when a television personality would be wildly successful with even a 5% market share, there is concern that press and broadcast outlets are too concentrated.