If one is an incident, two is a coincidence, and three is a trend, feature this – top news executives at the New York Times, CBS News, and CNN, all toppled in the past two years by scandals that were heightened by pressure from new journalistic outlets. Taken in isolation, the departures of the New York Times’s executive editor, Howell Raines, and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd; the managing editor of the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather, and three other CBS executives; and the executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN, Eason Jordan, would each be big events. Taken together, they suggest a news industry in the midst of a stunning revolution.

In each case, the particulars were different. But in each case there was one similarity. Prodded by the competitive pressure of a free market that includes not only a raft of newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets but also, now, Web sites such as National Review Online, Captainsquartersblog.com, instapundit.com, and slate.com, owners at the Times Company, Viacom, and Time Warner all responded to the uproars by sacrificing seasoned news executives with a sharply left-of-center world view. The Web sites aren’t always conservative, but at the Times, the new executive editor, Bill Keller, has recently been suggesting he thinks at least some of the conservative ire at the press is justified.

“They do not always see themselves portrayed in the mainstream press as three-dimensional humans, and they don’t see their ideas taken seriously or treated respectfully. This is something I’ve long felt we should correct, not to pander to red-state readers but because it’s bad journalism to caricature anyone with reductionist portraits and crude shorthand,” Mr. Keller recently told the New Yorker magazine. “Portraying conservatives fairly does not mean equal time for creationism. But it does mean, for example, writing about abortion in a way that does justice to the deep moral qualms most Americans have about it. It means trying to understand the thinking of people who regard gay marriage as unacceptable, who worry that gun controls represent an encroachment on their civil liberties.”

When we read those words, we couldn’t help thinking that Robert L. Bartley, late of the Wall Street Journal, must be smiling down from heaven. He had been warning for 30 years of the failure of the liberal press to listen to and respect the millions of Americans who are religious, who are modest, who are, in some instances, fundamentalist, who are patriotic in the old-fashioned sense. A close reader of the papers, Bartley no doubt would have, say, remarked at the speed with which the Times published a catch-up dispatch after our own Meghan Clyne reported last week that anger was simmering among religious leaders in the city that no one in either the government or the press was consulting them on the recent court ruling legalizing gay marriage.

One common thread, at least in the Eason Jordan and Dan Rather cases, involves cynicism in respect of the war. Mr. Rather got into trouble for maligning an officer, the young George W. Bush, who had not protested the Vietnam War. Mr. Rather did this in the context of a political campaign that was trying to discredit Mr. Bush’s bona fides in the current conflict. Mr. Jordan got into trouble trying to malign the tens of thousands of GIs still fighting in Iraq. Our sense is that, aside from their problems on the facts, both ran afoul of a sense of what might be called patriotic decency.

Not long ago, the columnist Mark Steyn wrote, “Remind me never to complain about ‘liberal media bias’ again. Right now, liberal media bias is conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.” It was a typically prescient observation. For it certainly seems that it’s not just honest-liberal editors, like Mr. Keller, who are waking up. In the Eason Jordan affair, it was an honest-liberal politician, congressman Barney Frank, who confronted CNN’s Mr. Jordan for his remarks in Davos accusing American troops of deliberately killing journalists. Our own view, stated several times before, is that we take no satisfaction from seeing liberal editors driven from their newsrooms. What we think will best serve the public interest is for more newsrooms to be set up, so the truth can be hammered out in the great journalistical fray.