(AP)

Journalists look out for each other. When colleagues or compatriots get fired, they lament the implications – for the outlet doing the firing, for the profession of journalism, and, finally, for America. The latest example of this impulse comes from Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post. He points out that the decline of newspaper circulation and news viewership has led to staff cuts and threatened serious investigative reporting. "If this erosion continues," he concludes, "it would be bad news for serious journalism, and good news for corrupt politicians."

Not so fast, say a pair of prominent media commentators. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade writes that staff cuts at American newspapers are not necessarily a threat to healthy democracy. "Without wishing to be unduly rude about US journalists, seen from the British perspective, it appears that there are far too many of them being far too unproductive," he writes. "The LA Times has 980 journalists at present, a huge staff compared to any serious British national paper. Yet we manage to hold our government to account."

Greenslade even suggests that "there's been a lot of feather-bedding on big monopoly metro papers in the States and the current crisis is providing an opportunity to hack away the hacks who do not contribute." When coming from a journalist, a statement like that is akin to heresy. But Greenslade has a compatriot in Slate's Jack Shafer, who questions the journalistic impulse to "somehow correlate the full employment of journalists with the common good." He argues that with technological innovation changing the rules of the game – "A middle-school student sitting at a Web terminal has more raw reportorial power at his fingertips than the best reporter working at the New York Times had in, say, 1975" – and declining circulation, "[s]omething's got to give."

All this is not much different that the argument made by NBC News President Steve Capus, who had to defend the recent staff cuts at NBC News. Capus argued that NBC could maintain the same news standard with fewer people, but skeptics like Bill Kovach of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, echoing Kurtz, said that such staff cuts are "going to thin our knowledge of the world somewhat."

I imagine journalists are reluctant to give an inch on this issue because they are worried that owners will take a mile – that they may start by cutting out the fat, but will soon after cut the quality staffers as well. Journalists don't trust their bosses to know when to stop, so they close ranks around even their most inefficient colleagues. Greenslade and Shafer may be pointing out a truth, but it’s a dangerous truth, since higher-ups will rarely put good journalism over high profits. Most everyone can agree that efficiency is good, and journalism is probably in need of some streamlining. But if the choice is between inefficient journalism and bad journalism, I'd opt for the former.