Is there a loss of honesty? Is that the best way of describing what's going on? And should journalists be beating themselves up about it? There's certainly a lack of hard facts. A constant feature of any political discourse in the UK for at least the past 10 years is basic disagreement about what ought to be discoverable facts. Has Labour improved the NHS? Well, maybe. Maybe not. But you can't nail down even such apparently hard facts as how much money has been spent. Claims of spending having been announced twice immediately start to zing around; is such-and-such an amount really new spending, or what would have been spent in any case? You can take the view that inflating the figures in this way is, in the end, counterproductive spin - because people will start to ask - and, indeed, have started to ask - if you've really spent that much extra money, where are the huge improvements to match?

Some news organisations have at least attempted to rise to this challenge - the Channel 4 FactCheck website & email service is excellent. But this kind of journalism - digging and checking and comparing - is relatively dull for the journalist, and expensive for their employers. Hence the increasing amounts of news agency copy re-written with a bespoke spin or angle to suit the publication or outlet.

Of course people like having their own prejudices reflected back at them - but this is no new phenomenon. The Guardian has always tried to satisfy its readers' appetite for stories of social woe that generally support their liberal, leftist assumptions about how society is structured. To first simplify and then exaggerate, Guardian stories say, "Look what the capitalist order has done now."

And the Mail says, "Look what stupid, dishonest, evil low-lifes are doing to us decent people now - and look what the weak-minded, Guardian-reading bleeding-heart liberals who run this country are letting them get away with."

It's all good stuff - it makes you feel better, which is the whole point and function of all forms of paranoia. There's nothing wrong with opinion, as long as it is asked for within a context of fact. When the facts are missing, or are capable of widely differing interpretations, opinion can get out of hand. Claims can be made, and made to sound plausible.

Take two recent examples, plucked from the airwaves:

"Immigrants are ruining the country. Their womenfolk are having more babies than the native population."

"In those parts of England where schools do most sex education, the rates of teenage pregnancy are higher - and where they do least, they're lowest."

Are both those statements true - or at least, based on true facts? I don't know - and neither does anyone else. How do we get closer to the truth? Yes, we can go on government websites for the latest statistics. We can ring up press offices and get statements, interviews with ministers (well-known as sources of objective fact and honest appraisal of contentious issues). But maybe journalists should do a bit more philosophy: if a country had a problem with teenage pregnancy, and if there were certain areas of that country where - for whatever reasons - the problem was worse than others, then the rational thing to happen would be for measures aimed at reducing the problem - sex education, for example - to be concentrated in those areas, either by deliberate acts of policy or just through local reaction, by individuals and schools, to the prevailing circumstances.

Now, whether or not sex education actually succeeds in reducing the rates of teenage pregnancy - that's a separate and contentious argument - if you took a snapshot of the country at that time, you'd see lots of sex ed going on in areas with lots of pregnant teenagers. Drawing the conclusion that the former CAUSES the latter is not a question of fact but of prejudice - or belief, if you want to be as polite as possible about it.

In short, we need as many facts as we can get, even if we have to grub for them. And then we have to interpret them, and try to acknowledge where prejudice and vested interests and, to put it bluntly, power, react with the apparent facts and alter our understanding of them. No amount of news bunnies can replace that task. Is there an appetite for that kind of journalism? Yes. But the evidence seems to be that it is shrinking. What are people losing out on by opting for a fragmented, partial, prejudice-satisfying news diet? Short answer: any influence on the powerful.

Newspapers, the BBC, Channel 4 News may die; but they will have to be re-invented - maybe on the web or some as yet unknown future media. If the basic need and democratic appetite for some sort of handle on our governing classes wanes, then I believe it will generate dissatisfaction and injustice sufficient to motivate its re-discovery. We're in a phase; a downturn. Not very nice if you're a journalist - or a citizen who tries to look beyond the grasping fist at the end of his own outstretched arm. Which we all have (my children are fed through it); the question is, what else do we have?

I'm not saying democracy is somehow self-sustaining; far from it - we may yet succeed in allowing ourselves to become a drugged, inert population, with sufficient energy only for fighting amongst ourselves. But if the faces on the screens are to be our faces - if we're the bunnies, let us be 'truth bunnies', not 'news bunnies'. It won't be objective, of course - but neither is most of what News feeds us now. If News doesn't like it (because we're not stepping up and delivering the desired spurt of 'compelling' emotional pornography) then News will spurn us, ban us. And we will have to sidestep the News.

We're never as far as we think we are from the brink of fascism, where television programmes are broadcast but no-one watches. We must simply keep our nerve, and use each technological advance for our own, private purposes - not as a way of 'revitalising' existing news outlets. That lets them off the hook of having to do real journalism - however, and via what media, it is then shared.