The problem is that media is a business like any other - if it sells subscriptions/advertisements/air time, it's news. Otherwise it's buried in the B section or after the weather.
Even the wire services compete to have their stories bought, so you end up with things like when Reuters photoshopped the Beirut pic.
It's like Hollywood; you have to have blood, explosions, and sex to be a blockbuster.
And the blogs are worse than useless - pretty much any time you see a "story" on a blog, you can google it and find that story repeated on about 12 sites, all quoting the original.
Example is a "news story" that got posted on a current events forum I frequent, about a tax-evader winning his case against the government, mentioning various US codes and precendent cases by case number. A bunch of people got all excited and passed along as truth. I did a two-minute search and found that none of the cases mentioned were real (findlaw.org is great) and US codes were made up.
But people who aren't a suspicious SOB like me might buy these blogs as bald truth that the MSM is "hiding".
What really ****** me off was the total lack of coverage of the bombing of an Army recruiting station in Times Square the other week. Hello - terrorist acts in NEW YORK CITY? You'd think that sort of thing might be news to some people especially considering where it happened...
I only found out from my buddy that works in Brooklyn. WTF, CNN?
