PETER SUDERMAN: Media Matters (To Itself): What Helen Thomas’s career has to do with the FTC’s push to reinvent journalism. “The problem with government’s fealty to the myths that establishment journalism has created for itself isn’t just the expense—it’s that it inevitably produces feedback loops. A government that props up the media inevitably leads to a media that props up the government. Despite being cloaked in the language of preservation, the real gap that these proposals fill isn’t in news coverage, but in the cozy linkage between government and media.”