Transparency please.

This past week we learned about the journalism of verification, and that nothing that hasn't been verified thoroughly should be printed. One part of this is that journalists should do their best to be transparent. Readers should know as much about the stories they read in the newspapers as the journalist who wrote them; they should not withhold anything from their readers or viewers. In the article, Too Transparent? (http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4073) by Rachel Smolkin she said, "It's unfair, even hypocritical, for the media to try to play by different rules, to ignore public demands for accountability that we would insist on from anyone else." Smolkin mentioned that the growing desire for newspapers to be more transparent recently is because of the pressure papers get from the blogosphere. They demand to know why some stories were written, why they were run in a certain day and why its on front page instead of another story. There is a lot more demand for knowing the motives behind the journalists and news organizations than there have been. And even if those concerns were present in the past, there wasn't a medium as effective as blogs to communicate them.

But at what point are journalists explaining too much to the readers? Shouldn't readers be more concerned about content than motives anyway? Smolkin addressed this question in the article, but I don't see it as being much of an issue.  Journalists ask for informed readers who ask questions, and usually good journalist are willing to provide answers to them. Its journalists who have something to hide who may be leery of readers who ask too many questions.