This past Sunday morning, like most Sundays, I got up, made coffee, fetched the paper. My dogs are too small to do the fetching. The Sunday paper is about as big as they are and “fetch” is not in their working vocabulary. They’re more likely to disappear down the street.
As usual, I sifted the paper to remove what is for me nothing more than fodder for the recycle bin – ads, travel section, style section (Ha!), movie listings ($15 for a crappy experience? No thanks.), want ads, classifieds, etc. That left me with 1/8 the original paper. What remained was gathered up to be tossed aside to be read here and there over the coming week. Hold on. Last week’s stack is still there. The stack even consists of bits from the week before that. And before that. Behind in my reading, I should say.
But I can’t say that. What I do once the chaff has been sifted from the paper is power up the laptop. I hit an “A” list of sites (Google News, Pajamas Media, Slashdot, Instapundit, Newsforge, Gateway Pundit and a few others) to find out what’s been happening. Then move on to a “B” list (Schneier on Security, Armed and Dangerous and Cato Unbound, just to list a few) which are updated less frequently and usually have more in depth analysis, opinion pieces and the opportunity to contribute to a dialog. These lists change depending on my interests and world events.
I read through the 1/8 of the paper that survived the sieve. As far as the news part of it is concerned, it was anything but current. Everything – and I mean everything – was news of which I was already aware. The interest pieces were not interesting. The entertainment pieces were boring (Is it me or just the hype which makes it seem like Angelina Jolie had been pregnant for 12 months?) The exceptions were the sports and opinions sections, being published to the web about the same time the hard copy goes to press. So I’d have to say I’m very much up on my reading. Its the hard copy newspaper which is behind.
The news race isn’t about covering the distance. Its about evolutionary speed. With blogs popping up like so many bunnies, its an abundance of riches – sort of. I still have to keep my chaff sifter handy as there is a lot of junk in the blogsphere. But blogs do a pretty damn good job of outing bogus news. This is something the MSM sucks at. In fact, they go the other way and are a significant source of problems when they work to manufacture the news they think I should be getting. Digitally altering pictures to fit a story or staging “news” such as Dateline NBC did when it sent Muslim-looking men to a NASCAR race with camera crew in tow in an effort to capture anti-Muslim sentiment among a collection of Americans NBC prejudiced as harboring such sentiment.
The Main Stream Media has become largely irrelevant and a source of little more than noise on its good days. And damn near dangerous on most of the rest. The arrogance is repugnant. Last year I dropped the daily delivery of the Denver Post and today I cancelled the Sunday only delivery. The TV news noise was solved ages ago with that handy little power button on the TV set. What can I say, Main Stream Mediocrity. Bub-bye news whores and purveyors of propaganda. See you in the funny papers.
[Edit History]
2006.07.08
The blogsphere is pretty damn good about dragging spineless, bitter, hateful slugs out into the sunlight as well.
2006.07.12
Some thoughts on a similar effect with the TV network news.
2006.08.06
More egregious MSM photo fakery vetted by Hot Air, echoed by Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin and critiqued by professional photographers.
2006.08.17
And then there is this:
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has begun an investigation of the use of video news releases, sometimes called “fake news,” at U.S. television stations.
Video news releases are packaged stories paid for by businesses or interest groups. They use actors to portray reporters and use the same format as television news stories.
The layers of fakery and fluff in the MSM news are thicker than Tammy Faye Baker‘s foundation.