BROOKE GLADSTONE: This week marks the fifth anniversary of On the Media. Actually, that's not strictly true. WNYC first launched On the Media 15 years ago as a local call-in show with former New York Times reporter Alex Jones. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ALEX JONES: Let's hear On the Media right after this news.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then again in 1997 as a pre-recorded hour distributed nationally by NPR, hosted by long-term WYNC host Brian Lehrer.

BRIAN LEHRER: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brian - [SOUND FADES OUT]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And finally in January 2001, it was retooled and launched yet again, this time with a bigger staff and a big ambition to redefine the media beat. We needn't have bothered. The ever-exploding beat has forced us to continually redefine the show. Mark Jurkowitz, long-term media critic, now back at the Boston Phoenix after many years at the Boston Globe, has been on the beat longer than most.

MARK JURKOWITZ: When I began to do media criticism, really in 1987, it was a very lonely profession. Media criticism was really very much a creature of the alternative press - columns like "Don't Quote Me" in the Boston Phoenix or "Press Clips" in the Village Voice. It consisted of people like myself who essentially were kind of self-appointed arbiters of good journalism, who mostly stood as sort of a watchdog over the big mainstream media in our own communities.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: A very lonely profession indeed, where puny Davids aim slingshots at the media Goliaths in their markets and rarely draw blood. Meanwhile, Goliath kept mum about how he went about his business.

MARK JURKOWITZ: You had really no media criticism to speak of in the mainstream media and very little transparency. It's always kind of been my hypothesis that if a Jayson Blair case or even a Judy Miller case had happened 20 years ago, we would have read about it - about a paragraph without a byline somewhere on, you know, page 22 of the paper, and that would have been the way it was dealt with.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: No more. The mainstream media fortress has been now and forever breached. But how, when, and why did that happen? Former OTM host Brian Lehrer hosts a daily call-in show on WNYC.

BRIAN LEHRER: You know, I had mixed feelings when I was first asked to host On the Media because on the one hand I was very, very interested in media - always have been; on the other hand, I thought that that might have been just kind of a thumb-sucking impulse because I was somebody who worked in the media. So I was really kind of surprised when just a few months after I started hosting the show, the Monica Lewinsky story broke and it seemed like suddenly the whole world was obsessing not just on the President and his young intern, but on the media coverage and the myriad media angles surrounding that story.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I noticed that too from my perch as NPR's first full-time media reporter. Suddenly my marginal beat was headline news because the Lewinsky scandal was also a media scandal.

BRIAN LEHRER: It really, in a way, did give rise to the modern polarized age in which lots of people on both the left and the right believe that the media are biased, incompetent or not somehow reflecting reality as they see it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, widely regarded as the dean of media reporters.

HOWARD KURTZ: I remember talking to Sam Donaldson during the Lewinsky period, and he was very much in the camp of "where's the outrage?" There were a lot of journalists in Washington who were angry at Bill Clinton, who felt betrayed, and meanwhile much of the country was certainly not happy with the sordid behavior that Clinton exhibited in the Oval Office, saw that he had lied, but felt that he had lied about a matter - sex - that was not germane to his running the country. And so you had this huge split that dominated all media discourse for more than a year, and you had this public backlash in many quarters against the journalists who didn't quite understand why more people didn't share their outrage at Bill Clinton's behavior.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: If the Lewinsky scandal gave the public a reason to distrust the media, technology was about to give it the means to talk back. Brian Lehrer.

BRIAN LEHRER: They used to say anybody who can set yourself up with a printing press can run a newspaper. Now anybody who can set yourself up with some blogging software, which is pretty easy to do, can set yourself up as a journalist or a commentator. And what's the first thing that people who set themselves up as bloggers often want to write about? How bad a job the mainstream media is doing, necessitating the existence of them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Blogs helped bring down media heavyweights like CBS anchor Dan Rather and CNN news chief Eason Jordan. During the last elections, one blob launched an Adopt-a-Journalist program which scrutinized the words of selected campaign reporters. You can even download podcasts of home-grown media crit, like this one.

BRYN (Itunes podcaster): And it, it's unbelievable. Like the coverage is completely different in Canada than it is here [CLEARS THROAT] in the States.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, posted this show in its first incarnation as a local live call-in.

ALEX JONES: I think that one of the problems is that on the Web, media criticism tends to be not real criticism but polemicism. That's not the way I look at what valuable media criticism is, which is, you know, let's look at this with an open mind and with as much intellectual honesty and rigor as we can and try to understand what the hell happened.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: When the world is shining the light on you, perhaps the best response is to shine that light on yourself first. Increasingly, news outlets hire ombudsmen to investigate the public's complaints. The New York Times is on its second so-called public editor since Jayson Blair. Transparency is not just a new media fashion, it's a lifejacket designed to keep news operations afloat in a sea of distrust. Now news anchors have blogs, news shows have blogs - even a news network, CBS, has a blog. And media people everywhere are eager to explain why they do what they do, right down to the camera angles chosen for political debates. Brit Hume on Fox.

BRIT HUME: There's a thing we have to worry about in television called "head room," and that is when you're trying to match shots side by side, one of the things you do is you give both parties the same amount of head room in the shot. Because of Kerry's height within the frame, his picture was necessarily bigger, and the result was you had more lectern and less Bush and Kerry's shot the other way around.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So amid the internal watchdogs and the external blogs, has a show like ours lost its purpose? The truth is, five years ago we felt like we had the field to ourselves, and now we find we're regularly scooped by "The Daily Show." Alex Jones says there is still a place for On the Media in the exploding media universe.

ALEX JONES: I think that is the kind of media criticism that will always have a market because I think people are interested in this stuff.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: On the other hand - [OVERTALK]

ALEX JONES: Well, you know, I liked it better when I was doing it. [LAUGHS]