Herculean attempts to be unbiased, washed as they are with corporate advertising dollars and corporate political contributions, are so fundamentally lacking in voice as to be dishonest. The mainstream media has turned into something like this: we are going to go to some trouble to tell you part of a story, but we’re not going publicly disclose the punchy version, the version with a real voice or a version with a passionate perspective that shows whether, how or why they actually give a damn.

When they are no longer in the public spotlight, politicians, corporate spokespeople, and journalists all talk differently. They privately talk with each other like the rest of us talk.  Anyone who deals with any of these sorts of people in private knows this.

I blame big corporate money (which is thoroughly woven to federal political power) for this immense disconnect between public and private dialogue. Although journalists and politicians present their polite and “unbiased” ways to us as their attempts to be unbiased or “professional,” this explanation is usually a façade and a cop-out. How could it be otherwise, given the MSM’s silence in the face of the long parade of misdeeds and lies of the current administration? The president has taken at least 100 major positions that should have had the media after him like a wild pack of dogs. A justifiably wild pack of dogs. I’m referring to Bush’s lies regarding global warming, stem cells, domestic spying, intelligent design, Iraq, Iraq and Iraq. The media should have run Bush out of town a long time ago but, with very few exceptions, they’ve politely sat on their hands.  They present the world to us as inexorable insanity instead of doing their job of putting the spotlight on genuinely intelligent people (not extremists) who speak for the people in this country who work hard to move past the MSM to stay informed.

I don’t know who’s going to save the ignorant public from this terrible situation. An unleashed media could save us, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

In my opinion, listeners and readers respect genuinely passionate voices backed up with facts, but they simpply aren’t getting solid information packaged in this straightforward and understandable way. Bloggers have stepped up valiantly, though most bloggers lack the fact-finding resources of the mainstream media. Fact-finding is critically important, but drilling down to demonstrate the facts requires a lot of work. Bush can easily claim that he fulfilled his guard duty, for instance, while (due to the destruction of evidence and that fact that the evidence is controlled by Bush himself) it takes immense effort to dig out hundreds of documents to show the lies.

Erika, I believe that the best approach lies in the direction you have suggested, though I am not at all clear on the details of how this will be accomplished in an environment so incredibly contaminated by big corporate money.