The debate is one between long-time, investigative (and very Left) journalist, Matt Taibbi, and famous Boston Globe senior editor, Ben Bradlee, Jr.

Among other things Mr Bradlee led the “Spotlight” team that nailed the Catholic church in Boston on all the sex abuse that its priests had been committing over the years.

Taibbi first came to my attention over a decade ago with a superb series of articles on the GFC. I don’t usually agree on his Left-wing take on things but he is a solid analyser of things.

The debate has a title that warms the cockles of my heart: Be it resolved: the mainstream media is dying, and that’s OK.

You should hit the link and read the transcript (or listen to the embedded audio), but there are several passages of particular note for me, starting with resources.

TAIBBI: For nearly 15 years, I was one of the few people in the country that had a traditional full-time investigative reporting job. I would get an assignment from Rolling Stone and be told to go off and work for two or three months on a story about an arcane topic like credit default swaps, or the ratings agencies on Wall Street. I would have to come back with a 6,000- or 7,000-word story that would have to be fact-checked from beginning to end, every line. These are expensive endeavors. They cost a lot for the companies, and there’s also a lot of logistical work that goes into them.

In the Internet age, when everybody’s revenue is tied to content, and people are surfing constantly, it’s very difficult to financially justify that kind of work.

BRADLEE: The Spotlight team that I used to oversee at The Globe has four reporters. They’re sequestered in another part of the newsroom, and they can often take up to a year on a project. But these days, with fewer and fewer resources and fewer reporters able to put out the paper anymore, I think many editors are viewing investigative reporting as a luxury they can’t afford.

But also attitudes inside the MSM:

TAIBBI: Reporters feel: if I don’t write something that the rest of the newsroom agrees with, I’m going to end up with a problem. That’s resulted in a lot of conformity, and an unwillingness to go anywhere near where the perceived line of debate might be. It’s also made people unwilling to go near an unpopular opinion.

BRADLEE: I think in many cases, political correctness has run amok at some of the bigger papers. Notably, there was the Tom Cotton affair, when the senator from Arkansas wrote an op-ed at The New York Times, which caused an internal uprising and got the op-ed editor fired. That’s too much. We can’t have the thought police intervening to that extent.

Attitudes fed by who journalists are nowadays, something I covered here in What journalists don’t know. Tabbi makes the same point:

TAIBBI: If you go on the plane on the campaign trail, most of the people on the plane now are graduates of Ivy League universities. They live in rarefied areas of expensive, cosmopolitan neighborhoods. Socially, they see themselves as being the same people as the politicians they’re reporting on.

That’s a terrible situation. I think that it’s an underrated problem within modern news media. It’s lost some touch with mass audiences — in part because they’re no longer the people who are covering the affairs of ordinary people.