Even if there weren't so many other bad omens about journalism's future at the moment, the recent results from a poll of 100,000 high school students would have been enough in and of themselves to plant some fear and loathing in a reporter's heart.

"Nearly three-fourths of high school students either do not know how they feel about the First Amendment or admit they take it for granted," the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced on Jan. 31.

A scant majority of students -- 51 percent -- agreed that "newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories." That was considerably lower than the 70 percent of adults who agreed with that statement.

More than half of the surveyed students either said they believe "the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees" (35%) or don't know what they think about that statement (21%).

The release of those chilling numbers somehow made the news of Hunter S. Thompson's suicide, just three weeks later, even sadder for me.

The decades-old argument over whether Thompson was a "real" journalist erupted again after his death. Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten said he was "a social satirist of biting comedic power," but his work was really "performance art, not journalism."

Whether he was or wasn't a journalist (and I believe he was, among many other things), Thompson was a champion, and a fiercely independent practitioner, of free speech.

That was immediately clear to anyone who read his outrageous, freewheeling dispatches from the presidential campaign trail in 1972 as the "national affairs editor" for the still-young, and much less slick, Rolling Stone magazine.

I was transfixed by some of those articles when they first came out, but missed a fair number, so I went to a bookstore to buy Thompson's collection of his 1972 coverage, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, right after it was published in 1973.

Browsing through my slightly tattered copy again after Thompson's death, it was easy to see how he'd made such a name for himself covering the Democratic primaries and then the fall race between Republican incumbent Richard Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern.

What Thompson called "gonzo journalism" was, at least during the 1972 campaign, an astonishing collage. There was first-person reporting, packed with behind-the-scenes details about politicians, campaign aides and reporters. Acute, often prescient, commentary. Hilarious invective (probably not so funny to certain targets). Tall tales, which anyone should have know, though some apparently didn’t realize were fiction. Anecdotes (at least some of which were evidently nonfiction) involving various intoxicants. Occasional dollops of idealistic rage at what the writer believed were corrupt betrayals of American democracy.

He was "the quintessential outlaw journalist," J. Anthony Lucas raved in a long-defunct magazine called More: The National Journalism Review. Newsweek called his coverage the "most refreshing phenomenon" of the 1972 campaign. Herb Caen, the legendary columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, said he was "this country's greatest political reporter."

Others, of course, took a dimmer view, such as a critic in the Columbia Journalism Review who lamented Thompson's use of "libelous epithets." (Thompson, for instance, declared that even Nixon, whom he thoroughly despised, was preferable to Democrat Hubert Humphrey, a "treacherous brain-damaged old vulture."

His 1972 campaign dispatches reveal that Thompson respected other, far-more-conventional journalists, whom he observed working under brutal, daily deadline pressure. Many mainstream journalists, in turn, admired his work and praised him in recent weeks in an outpouring of obituary columns. I think one reason for the accolades may be that he got away with being so outspoken, and also because he took aim at the news industry's own shortcomings.

In 1986, for instance, during a two-year stint as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, Thompson decried the "accountants," "profit-takers" and "Big Business cost-cutters" he held responsible for damaging television news, in contrast to the work of "heroes" such as Walter Cronkite and Bill Moyers.

In his introduction to Campaign Trail '72, he explained "one of the traditional barriers" he decided to ignore when he took the election assignment from Rolling Stone. "As far as I was concerned," he wrote, "there was no such thing as 'off-the-record.' The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists—in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis."

(Reading those words after Thompson's death, I thought of the recent criticism, and self-criticism, of some prominent segments of the news media for failing to be aggressive enough in scrutinizing the weapons-of-mass-destruction question in the lead-up to the Iraq War.)

Some of his eulogists didn't just mourn Thompson, but waxed elegiac about an era when the promise of journalism in general seemed brighter.

The New Yorker's Louis Menand wrote that Thompson's anger, when it was channeled into the written word in the Nixon era, "was a beautiful thing, fearless and funny and, after all, not wrong about the shabbiness and hypocrisy of American officialdom. It belonged to a time when journalists believed that fearlessness and humor and honesty could make a difference, and it's sad that the time in which such a faith was possible has probably passed."

There's certainly enough evidence floating around to lend credence to the idea that Menand is correct.

Reporting on the Knight Foundation survey of high school students, the Houston Chronicle interviewed a journalism teacher who wasn't surprised by the findings. "In the past, I had students who would buck up against the principal for not letting something in the paper," she said. "Now, I don't have anyone like that at all."

A major part of journalism's current malaise certainly derives from self-inflicted wounds -- the various scandals and missteps at pillars like the New York Times, USA Today and CBS, not to mention the cutbacks that go along with the relentless pursuit of ever-higher profits at many media corporations.

Then there's the adversarial shout-fest of talk radio, cable television and political blogs, which may be creating public disenchantment with "the news media" in general, extending to traditional reporting. (It's been suggested that Thompson's early work helped open the gates for today's flood of angry commentary, though he could just as well be viewed as a satirical heir to H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.)

I'm not alone in worrying that journalists' credibility could be damaged by a string of recently revealed actions by the Bush administration -- the credentialing of a partisan website's employee as a White House correspondent (who was allowed to ask frequent questions in news conferences); payments to seemingly independent commentators to promote administration policies; and video press releases designed to resemble actual newscasts.

Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, has argued that the administration is actively working to "de-certify" the press in the eyes of the public.

Whether he's right or not, these are strange, foreboding times for journalists. Amid so many worrisome portents, it may even seem weird to cling to the faith that good, serious reporting can continue to play an essential role in our democracy. What's a simple reporter or editor to do? It's enough of a job just to do the job, especially when that involves covering a beat as demanding as the environment.

As often as it's already been quoted in the days since Thompson's departure, it seems fitting to turn for a little guidance to what was probably his single most famous sentence -- a Gonzo aphorism, but one for the ages.

"When the going gets weird," he advised, "the weird turn pro."