For the past few weeks I've been looking back through 2005, rereading news stories big and small, searching for a coherent narrative of media trends. I engaged in this exercise not only as a journalist and editor—but also as a concerned citizen—someone who has watched corporations buy up independent media companies, who has noted the stenography to power that often passes for reportage, and who believes, as Bill Moyers has said, that "the quality of our journalism and the quality of our democracy are deeply intertwined."

I must be a poor trendspotter, because I could not concoct a unified-field theory of media dynamics from the available evidence. So instead, I bring you the lowlights from 2005.

Here's the latest leak from inside the Beltway: Journalists are part of the establishment they cover. Plamegate has pulled back the curtain on the culture of insider journalism at play in the corridors of power, and it is an ugly machine to watch at work. (Which juicy tidbit of administration propaganda will I publish today? Which confidential source will I try to bogusly protect under the First Amendment?) I won't belabor the point, as I explained how Judith Miller betrayed her profession in the last issue, but now legendary investigative reporter Bob Woodward has come under scrutiny for not spilling the beans to his editor about a phone call he received from an as-yet-unnamed administration official outing Plame (and for subsequently appearing on "Larry King Live" and belittling the importance of the leak.) It's beginning to look like the story that could topple the Bush administration might take down more than one journalist with it.

In our June issue, we published an excerpt of a speech Bill Moyers gave at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis earlier this year. The speech was an impassioned defense of independent journalism, and was in part a response to charges of "liberal bias" made by Kenneth Tomlinson, then chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), about Moyers's weekly new show "NOW" on PBS. (Never mind that the CPB, as per its charter, is supposed to act as a buffering agent between where public radio and TV get their money—Congress, for the most part—and their programming, allowing them to operate without political interference.) Fast forward to mid November. It turns out that not only did Tomlinson repeatedly break the law, as well as CPB's own guidelines, in a campaign to combat liberal bias, including putting White House staffers on the payroll to watch "NOW" and report back on Moyers, but he also promoted and secured funding for "The Journal Editorial Report," a program which would serve as a platform for the conservative editorial page of The Wall St. Journal. (Tomlinson is also under investigation for financial chicanery in his hiring of outside consultants. My inner conspiracy monger wonders if the Bush administration didn't appoint Tomlinson to act as a one-man wrecking ball, tarnishing the reputation of public broadcasting so badly that they would finally have the rationale—mismanagement, see!—to stop funding the CPB.)

Tomlinson's maneuvers clearly explicate one enduring theme from the past year: It's not hard to spot a political hatchet man on a partisan crusade.

Everyone's favorite radio giant, Clear Channel Communications, decided earlier this year that its reputation as the evil, homogenizing demon of radio was bruising sales of concert tickets. So how did the corporate behemoth rebrand itself?

In a change that the company never formally announced, Clear Channel's name began disappearing from concert promotion offices across the country. Its concert office in San Francisco is again known as Bill Graham Presents. Cellar Door is back in Detroit, and Ron Delsener Presents is back in business in New York. But all of these promoters—who were bought by Clear Channel in the great wave of consolidation following the Telecommunications Act of 1996—are still part of the Clear Channel empire. Only the names have changed. A brilliant piece of wolf-in-sheep's-clothing repositioning by the corporation, which now gets indy cachet without indy hassles (first among them fighting Clear Channel's monopolistic market share) while keeping its extensive promotional resources.

Village Voice Media and New Times Media announced in late October that they would merge, creating the largest chain of metro weeklies in the country, with 17 newspapers and $400 million in assets. What this merger means is unclear as of yet. The Village Voice is nothing like the paper founded by Norman Mailer 50 years ago—it's been a multi-million dollar, corporate-run entity for the last 15 years like many of the alt-weeklies. And as the loss of classified revenue (a major source of income for alt-weeklies) to Craigslist and other Internet advertising intensifies, the alt-weeklies are staking their bets on national corporate advertising—think liquor and cigarettes—and the merger will surely strengthen its marketing appeal in that regard.

We'll have to wait until next year to see what effect this merger has in the pages of the combined entity, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for any Pulitzer-winning stories.

—Brian K. Mahoney