Firstly, no-one does journalism for the money, unless you're one of those celebrity 'journalists' (in reality entertainers) on 60 Minutes or another of those powder puff 'current affairs' shows. And in low-wage New Zealand, the money is even worse. I would wager that check-out chicks at Foodtown pull in as much per week as your average regional newspaper reporter. In fact, I doubt that many of those struggling papers actually employ reporters any more. They just get a couple of downtable sub-editors and a layout sub to cobble together scraps from the NZPA wire, copy from unpaid local stringers and rewritten PR handouts.

With mainstream media clearly in a death spiral, I quit journalism two years ago after a quarter of century in the business. Ironically, I now make my living partly by addressing conferences about the plight of the industry that used to employ me. What's killing the media? In a nutshell, the so-called rivers of gold - the classified ads that subsidised quality reporting - have now migrated to the web (real estate, cars, jobs). People now see utility in those ads irrespective of  journalism. At the same time, the readers (particularly those under 30) are getting their news for free off the web. Yes, internet advertising is growing, but not sufficiently to replace the higher margin advertising in print and television.

So newspapers struggle on by plastering their pages with virtually free wire copy and cheap-to-produce opinion pieces. As the news is a commodity, you seek to differentiate your 'brand' by hiring columnists with a propensity for getting up people's noses. I'm talking here about contrarians and controversalists and clowns, people who are willing to say the most outrageous things purely to create a splash and get thousands of indignant readers writing to the editor, threatening to cancel their subscriptions.

Of course, they never do cancel their subscriptions, well very few anyway. They just buy the paper again next week just so they can work themselves up into a rage all over again. Incidentally, that's why newspapers most commonly read by university educated cosmopolitan liberals (like The Sydney Morning Herald) are so full of opinion pieces by members of their political enemies in the reactionary right. We hate the opinions of these fascist troglodytes, but like a dog coming back to its own vomit, we can't resist reading their bile.

As for these claims that newspapers are deliberately misleading people, please. To build their circulation, newspapers have always (as far back as the 'yellow press' of the 19th century) appealed to and exploited the public's most base prejuidces, its most wrong-headed misconceptions and its most popular falsehoods to feed their own circulation. You can appeal for greater quality till the cows come home. But the fact is quality does not sell. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

PT Barnum was right. No-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the general population. But that's not stopping anyone of you starting up, if you really want to, your own website full of independent, even-handed and fair-minded analysis. Just don't expect to get rich out of it.

Secondly, while I think Rattue's piece was a bit over the top, you have to remember that the role of a journalist is ask the questions that people in power don't want to answer. Sometimes these questions make people feel uncomfortable. Journalists, particularly in undemocratic Asian nations, are forever being told to shut up and stop asking impertinent questions of their betters. The fact is the best reporters tend to be nosy, sceptical and cheeky. Typically, they're not what you would describe as "nice" people. They tend not to take 'no' for an answer and, sometimes, they can push things too far. But that's the price you pay for having a lively, democratic press.

As for supposed 'impartiality', there really is no such thing. Notions that there is some ultimate objective 'truth' about anything, beyond the basic agreed facts are just a little naive. Everything is open to interpretation. We have an example right here underneath our noses. Every four years when the All Blacks crash out of the World Cup, there are dozens of threads on this website (some extending to 30 pages or more) of passionate debate about what happened and why. And, of course, nearly every one feels that their own perspective is the right one.

My own perspective is that Rattue's piece, as silly as it was, reflected a sense that the real story around Henry's reappointment has not been told; that the NZRU, having backed him to the hilt in the years leading up to the 2007 competition, felt it could not replace him with at least an equally strong candidate without heads having to roll internally.

But in saying this, I accept that many others here have a different view.

I just think that shooting the messenger - even a clown like Rattue - misses the point.