I had an epiphany about ten years ago when I was invited to a White House picnic for the press corps. I was there for about twenty minutes when it hit me that all these people (liberals and conservatives alike) -- all the members of the press, all the politicians, all the lobbyists -- are interrelated and they all depend on each other. To most of the country the term "inside the Beltway" is a kind of euphemism, but I saw it in action that day.

In Washington no one really has permanent friends or enemies because everyone is so interdependent. The politicians are dependent on the press for good coverage and the press is dependent on the politicians for access. If they can't get access, they've got nothing to report. And that's the danger of the corporatization of media. When I first started working in radio, for example, news wasn't a profit center. News was something you did because your license said you were required to operate in the public interest. Little by little, that's changed. The biggest impetus to making media "go corporate" was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That allowed the consolidation of broadcast outlets that didn't exist before. The effect has been to make the need for access even more pronounced because there is more pressure to perform and make money. The object before was to fulfill an obligation that those stations and outlets felt they had to their listeners and viewers. The object now is the bottom line.

Mordechai Vanunu grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home but abandoned the faith by his mid teens. He became interested in the existentialist writers and was an atheist for nearly two decades before he converted to Christianity. He was baptized just weeks before he was kidnapped by the Mossad, endured a closed door trial and then spent the next 18 years in jail-most of it in solitary for telling the world the truth: that Israel had gone nuclear.