In the past decade, the New Yorker has been the only news organization (aside from Wikileaks) doing significant investigative journalism.

That's quite an assertion. I'd say that a few public radio programs I listen to have done some great investigative journalism.

Specifically:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h...

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/07/182010027/episode-...

http://www.propublica.org/article/finding-oscar-massacre-mem...

NPR is great, but never questions the legitimacy of the US Government.

B/c few entities have the ability to do it. The public relies upon the press to act as a check against government power and corruption. This is why we have the 1st amendment.

The cozy relationship between the press and government rots away at the foundations of freedom and democracy. It is a moral duty of the press to expose corruption at all levels.

Notably, the NY Times (one of the few papers with the reach and scale to do meaningful investigation of US Government corruption) has written a variety of slander pieces about Julian Assange, strangely deciding to pick sides. The paper had the ability to act as a responsible intermediary between the leaked data and the public, but instead chose to flagrantly side with government power.

...This is a more subtle form of the same arrogant jingoism (and American flag pin wearing foolishness) of Fox News reporters.

This is just blatantly untrue. Take a look at Pulitzer Prizes for Investigative Journalism since 2003 (http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Investigative-Reporting):

* The New York Times

* The Blade (Toledo, OH)

* Willamette Week (Portland, OR)

* The Washington Post

* The Birmingham (AL) News

* The Chicago Tribune

* The New York Times

* The New York Times

* ProPublica

* Philadelphia Daily News

* Sarasota Herald Tribune

* The Seattle Times

* The Associated Press

* The New York Times

If that's not a diverse group of news organizations, I don't know what it.

That also doesn't include things like the Walter Reed Army Medical center scandal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reed_Army_Medical_Center...), because it falls under the Public Service category: http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Public-Service.

How many of those stories would cause the reader to question core assumptions about the legitimacy of the US Government?

Corporate, local, and state-level corruption are all small potatoes fare that is used (along with sensational stories with little actually news content) as a tool to help the orgs pretend to be doing real journalism.

Notably, the NY Times was complicit in the propaganda effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Let me get this straight.

Any investigative journalism that does not directly address what you believe to the most important topic (the legitimacy of the US government) is automatically not actual investigative journalism. Not only that, anything that does not address your favorite championed cause is automatically "small potatoes" that is in fact part of the conspiracy for journalists all over the country to fool everyone into believing real journalism is occurring.

Are you seriously leveling this claim?

In other news, all sci-fi TV shows are in fact not actual sci-fi TV shows because they aren't Firefly.

When he first took office, George W. Bush thinned the herd of the White House press core. He broke the tradition of seasoned reporters getting access and replaced it with selective access based on his personal like/dislike of individual reporters.

This has had a chilling effect on de-facto press freedom in DC. In the meantime we've seen utterly shocking things go largely unreported b/c topics are generally verboten and the press instead focuses on less consequential issues.

In comparison to the stuff that is not getting significant press, the smaller stuff is largely irrelevant to the lives of most Americans.

There are great reporters who write about everything from local sports to local corporate corruption, but the high quality of their work should not shield the major players from accountability for utterly failing in their major moral and professional duty.

I admire their excellent investigative work, but they're certainly not the only one. Just three days ago the New York Times published a fascinating article [0] about a crooked Brooklyn detective who, with the collusion of Elizabeth Holtzman's AG office, put probably dozens of innocent people in prison for murder. These cases are getting reviewed and the victims released after years in jail, partly due to the Times' investigation. This is just a recent example.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/nyregion/doubts-about-dete...

Almost true but not quite. Both Harper's and Mother Jones can generally be counted upon to rake a little muck.

There was a fantastic article from Mother Jones yesterday exposing how terrible America's prisons are, and in fact MJ shows up here about once a month or so, it seems.

You're talking about "in North America", right?

Only?

Tne Stranger? Seattle Times?