We have finally achieved, as a nation, what our aspiring upper middle class has always wanted. We have become, in one significant aspect, decidedly European. What this change portends for something I love -- the newspaper you're holding right now or reading on a glowing screen -- is little short of disastrous.

If the future seems bleak to those of us whose livelihoods rest on reporting, it should also worry those whose livelihoods require a free and well-informed society, because what my union's bumper sticker says is true: "Democracy Depends on Journalism."

Throughout my childhood, my parents subscribed to both local papers, The Kansas City Times in the morning and the Star in the evening. The two papers had the same owner, but we got different columnists and comics in each, and we wanted to read everything.

Annual field trips to the great Nelson Art Museum, established by the Star's founding publisher, and hometown pride in former Star reporter Ernest Hemingway further instilled the sense of a newspaper's pivotal cultural significance. When I left home for college, I got a subscription to The Washington Post as soon as I moved into the dorm.

But when I traveled to France for graduate work, I found a very different situation. My first day there I went to the corner newsstand and found a dozen or so newspapers to choose from -- several from Paris and others from neighboring countries.

Uncertain what to buy, I asked the shopkeeper which was the best newspaper in France. He laughed a lot -- evidently not just at my accent -- and said, "Well, that depends on whether your politics are to the left or the right."

What? Why would that matter? Didn't honesty and quality forestall a multitude of partisan sins? Ah, we naive Americans ...

Twenty-five years later, the naivete is gone. U.S. news consumers have come to believe the sources they'd long trusted as, uh, fair and balanced are, in fact, not.

Left-leaning voters are no doubt tired of conservatives flailing the dead horse of "media bias," but if the result of the well-documented problem is the death of reliable journalism or the impairment of representative government, then they might want to lay down their partisanship and pay attention.

In the post-Watergate era, the ink-stained wretches of the press enjoyed a new respect, but ad-driven television was already outstripping the reach of subscription-dependent print. Just as TV news became more powerful, though, its stories got shorter.

But did brevity alone explain why, say, network reporters consistently referred to "Reagan budget cuts" in social welfare programs, rarely if ever identifying them correctly as "reductions in the rate of growth"? Such inaccuracies outraged conservatives and intrigued political scientists, leading the former to seek redress in talk radio and prompting the latter to conduct in-depth studies that established the strong leftward tilt of "The Media Elite," to borrow S. Robert Lichter's 1986 title.

Twenty years later, a UCLA study found 18 of 20 major media outlets were left of center (with -- gasp! -- The Wall Street Journal's news pages registering the farthest left). While the media haven't changed, the public sure has. A 2006 Pew Research Center report traced the public's declining trust that coverage is bias-free -- from 62 percent in 1987, to 53 percent in 1996, to 48 percent in 2000, to 38 percent in 2004.

As awareness of bias grows, readers and viewers increasingly opt for media outlets that reflect their own partisan tilt. This is the European model, imported not by choice (68 percent of us would prefer a neutral news source) but due to dereliction of duty.

This polarization is bad for business: A biased outlet eliminates at least one-third of its potential audience -- a terrible reality for newspapers (and for the broadcast and Internet outlets that rely on them).

But, even worse, it's bad for democracy. There is a strong correlation between newspaper readership and voting -- between staying informed and participating.

It's no accident that the Reformation and Enlightenment swept Europe just as moveable type made the Bible widely available. Access to the printed word and growing literacy reinforced the anti-hierarchical ideal of "the priesthood of the believer" -- the notion that each man can read and determine the truth for himself.

And it's no accident that this kind of citizenry -- engaged, independent, vigilant -- gave birth to the American Experiment. People tempted to be indifferent to the fate of a common journalism should ask themselves, If one of the ingredients necessary to self-government mutates, or even disappears, how can this historical experiment continue?