What Media Bias?
ABC News is actively looking for military funerals to cover during the Presidential inauguration. Note: Only Iraq war dead's families need apply. Afghanistan, training, peacekeeping, that doesn't count.

Animals.

She Could Get Them Killed
Powerline discusses the incredible ignorance, bias, and irresponsibility of a piece in the New York Times on everybody's favorite Iraqi bloggers. It boggles the mind, but let's face it: Whenever the media covers something you know anything about, you're outraged by how wrong they get it, aren't you?

Therefore, it stands to reason that pretty much every report is this incompetent and fact-free.

CBS To Become Less Credible
It seems that the CBS executives who were asked to resign haven't done so. More hilariously yet, without Dan Rather, a man who ran a broadcast based on fake documents, they're apparently considering Jon Stewart, a man who fakes his entire broadcast every evening.

They're Asking Too Many Questions
Ken Auletta accidentally lets the cat out of the bag on why liberals hate FOX News so much:

Then you've got Fox News, which is admittedly more partisan or perceived as more partisan, and so people then start to say, hey, wait a second, they're all partisan.

If only FOX hadn't made the peasants think, curse them. (Via Tim Blair)

Justice Delayed
Do ya feel that Mapes, do ya?

Mapes was once nearly jailed for protecting a murder suspect.

Four CBS News employees, including three executives, have been ousted for their role in preparing and reporting a disputed story about President Bush's National Guard service.

Well pardon me, but it wasn't "disputed", it was "a lie".

The action was prompted by the report of an independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with a "rigid and blind" defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.

Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard' deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated.

The story is pretty syrupy with regards to the failure itself, and it'll be interesting to go through the report, but good to see they're finally acting on this. Heh, "weeks, not months" my ass.

Update: Instapundit has links to lots of various thoughts on this, and I'm inclined to agree: They apparently don't acknowledge whether there were political motivations (although it's a rhetorical question to begin with), and there doesn't seem to be any acknowledgement of the fact the documents were fakes. Of course, that isn't what CBS said they'd investigate, as people predicted, they simply decided to find out where the "failure" was that allowed the documents to air since they were "not up to CBS standards". (Presumably, in order to use forgeries, CBS insists they be very good forgeries.) As Powerline mentioned before the report came out, this wasn't an investigation, because CBS didn't hire investigators. That's what still has to happen here: If CBS were honestly misled, wouldn't they be interested in finding out who misled them? Worst of all, Dan Rather still insists the documents are real.

Update: Mary Mapes says she's being "persecuted", and complains that the report never said the documents were proven fakes. Spare me. I'll find a copy of the statement, it's hilarious.

Update: LGF has it.

I am shocked by the vitriolic scape-goating in Les Moonves’s statement. I am very concerned that his actions are motivated by corporate and political considerations - ratings rather than journalism. Mr. Moonves's response to the review panel's report and the panel's assessment of the evidence it developed in its investigation combine not only to condemn me, but to put all investigative reporting in the CBS tradition at risk.

Much has been made about the fact that these documents are photocopies and therefore cannot be trusted, but decades of investigative reporting have relied on just such copies of memos, documents and notes. In vetting these documents, we did not have ink to analyze, original signatures to compare, or paper to date. We did have context and corroboration and believed, as many journalists have before and after our story, that authenticity is not limited to original documents. Photocopies are often a basis for verified stories.

Before the Bush/Guard story aired, the newly found documents that supported it were thoroughly examined and corroborated.

The contents of the new documents mesh perfectly, in large ways and small, with all previously known records. The new documents also were corroborated by retired Gen. Bobby Hodges, the late Col. Killian's commander, who said that the documents showed Col. Killian's true sentiments as well as his actions in the case. After the broadcast, Marian Carr Knox provided the same corroboration in her televised interview.

Yet, despite the panel's recognition of the heretofore unchalleneged integrity of my work in the past, the panel was quick to condemn me here on the basis of statements of people who told my associates and me very different versions than what they told the panel.

I cooperated fully with the review panel, provided them with more than 1,000 pages of reporting and background materials and answered each and every one of their questions completely and truthfully. To the extent that my answers differed from others' statements, I can only emphasize my own honesty and integrity in attempting to reconstruct the details of the days leading up to the story's airing.

It is noteworthy the panel did not conclude that these documents are false. Indeed, in the end, all that the panel did conclude was that there were many red flags that counseled against going to air quickly. I never had control of the timing of any airing of a 60 Minutes segment; that has always been a decision made by my superiors. Airing this story when it did, was also a decision made by my superiors, including Andrew Heyward. If there was a journalistic crime committed here, it was not by me. Those superiors also made the decision to give the White House little time to consider or respond to the Killian documents. Contrary to the conclusions of the panel, I vetted all aspects of the story with my editors. In fact, as I have always done with my editors, I told them everything.

I believe the segment presented to the American people facts they were free to accept or reject, and that as those facts were presented, there was nothing that was false or misleading. I am heartened to see that the panel found no political bias on my part, as indeed I have none. For 25 years, I have built a reputation as a fair, honest and thorough journalist....

How many lies can you pack into one statement?

Watching News "Tantamount to Torture"
Take the Abu Ghraib quiz, and see how badly the media screwed up your perceptions. Meanwhile, Power Line examines the egregious media misrepresentations about Alberto Gonzalez.

False and Defamatory
The recent columns of the Star Tribune's resident greaseball, Nick Coleman, have cost them an advertiser.

Ooooo, Nick's in troooouuubble....

Media Mayhem
You may be wondering why I haven't said much about this piece. As far as I'm concerned, the story doesn't actually say much, and until more facts are available, there's not much to say. The facts of the story simply say the detainees at Guantanamo may be there for a while, so the CIA and Pentagon want to come up with better arrangements for them. (It being customary to hold detainees til the cessation of hostilities, that's totally reasonable.) The WaPo appears to be trying to frame common sense in sinister overtones to angry up the readership's blood, and I suspect that when more facts are available, it will once again reveal what a travashamockery the Washington Post is as a newspaper. This is, after all, the same publication that last month breathlessly announced on the front page that there's a prison camp in Cuba, apparently imagining they had some kind of scoop going.

It's Because They're Imbeciles
The New York Times has jumped some kind of horrible shark in referring to Democratic Underground as a blog, an error they made quite a bit during Rathergate regarding Free Republic. Glenn Reynolds:

Perhaps to some, "blog" is a synonym for "things on the Internet that we don't read or understand, but feel compelled to write about."

Wizbang, on the other hand, notes a different trend:

"In the last 90 days Wizbang has been mentioned by the AP, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. In every story -including the one that focused on how errors are corrected in the blogosphere- the big media outlet made significant errors of fact."

Yeah.

Truth to Power
The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Nick Coleman, mocked here for pig-ignorance, insists he isn't a limousine liberal, something which I have trouble believing anyone ever actually called him. Well, he's a lot more limousine than I.

Regarding wealth, I'm sure Nick Coleman and Laura Billings are well into the six figures with their combined salaries from the newspapers (your subscription dollars at work, folks). Given his tenure, I imagine Nick's got to be getting close to $100K all on his own. Am I to understand, he doesn't consider that to be wealthy?

Regarding being born into privilege, Nick Coleman's father was among the most powerful men in the state, including four terms as Senate Majority Leader, from 1973 to 1981. His step mother, Deborah Howell, worked at the Minneapolis Star from 1965 to 1979, rising to the post of City Editor. In 1973, Nick was given a job as city hall reporter, for the Minneapolis Star. In 1979, Deborah Howell moved to the Pioneer Press serving as Managing Editor, then Executive Editor, until 1990. In 1986, stepson Nick was given a columnist position, at, guess what, the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

And he's claiming not to have been a beneficiary of privilege? His chosen profession straddles the realms of his (step)parental spheres of influence - politics and journalism. His employment history follows in lock step coordination with that of his stepmother. Would he like us to believe his career trajectory in this town is based exclusively on his talent (cough cough) and not the doors opened to him because of his familial connections?

Maybe that is what he truly believes. It wouldn't surprise me that a man who defines journalism as "to scrutinize the actions of those in power" would create delusions about his own power dependent life circumstances. How else could he sleep at night?

Since Coleman claims he's a worldly journalist since he's "reported from almost every county in the state", I'd say it's pretty fair to apply his own standards and say that he's a limousiner alright, in Minnesota. (Via Instapundit)

Media? I have no media!
The story:

The U.S. Justice Department released a new memo on Friday to replace a controversial document outlining how to avoid violating U.S. and international terror statutes while interrogating prisoners.

The Reuters headline:

U.S. Replaces Memo on Torture with New Guidelines

Gee, that's not loaded. Meanwhile, over at the always incredible New York Times:

"Irate Over 'Stingy' Remark, U.S. Adds $20 Million to Disaster Aid."

There is no cause and effect relationship, and the story doesn't imply one. The New York Times simply made it up. "Heroic UN uses mighty 'words' to force greedy American baby killers to help!" Then we have this winner, Leigh Sales at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who was apparently serious when she said this:

While the US Government is so far giving $44 million to the tsunami victims, the National Retail Federation here predicts Americans will spend more than $200 billion on presents, food and holiday sales this Christmas.

Apparently, her main concern is that the government doesn't control all money spent in the United States. Honestly, she can't tell the difference between government money sent to a foreign land and the trillions of dollars of transactions done between American citizens every day? Someone should tell her that evil drug company (TM) Pfizer has donated $35 million all by themselves, becoming one in a long list of sinister world-raping American megacorporations to donate huge gobs of cash, supplies, and equipment to help people out, including FedEx, Home Depot, Northwest Airlines, Pepsi, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Verizon. She won't likely report on that, because Business = Hitler.

Seriously, though, I expect a full disclosure of what Sales does with her income, so we can compare how much the reptilian harpy wastes on bourgeois sentimentality like Christmas gifts and furniture, when she should be living in a tent and eating grass so she can give all her income to her sort of causes, like tsunami relief, Greenpeace, and Hamas.

To the extreme!
Powerline is investigating, in a journalistic fashion, the lack of journalistic standards at the Star Tribune that allowed Nick Coleman, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's resident blog hater to publish his latest ridiculous attack. Nick, you may recall, knows a lot more about the world than bloggers because he's covered stories all over Minnesota. Amazingly, he's still mad at us, especially Powerline. The guy must've really liked Dan Rather.

These guys pretend to be family watchdogs but they are Rottweilers in sheep's clothing. They attack the Mainstream Media for not being fair while pursuing a right-wing agenda cooked up in conservative think tanks funded by millionaire power brokers.

Uh, so who cooked up your agenda, there, Nick? A mentally unstable journalist? Who do you think runs the show over at the DNC? The March of Dimes? Who's George Soros, anyway?

They should call themselves "Powertool." They don't speak truth to power. They just speak for power.

Long live the People's Revolution. *yawn*

I work for a dopey old newspaper committed to covering the news fairly while Powerline doesn't make boring commitments. They are not Mainstream Media. They are Extreme Media. Call them reliable partisan hacks.

That's what Nick still just can't register: The problem is that the mainstream media claims to cover the media fairly, but has an openly leftist agenda. We're all biased. It's just that bloggers don't lie about it.

That's what they call me: A reliable partisan hack, even though they sometimes like columns I write about dumb things Democrats do. I have criticized many dumb Democrats, but Democrats don't matter these days. All the power is in the hands of Republicans, and Powerline's job is to make life easier for them. Mine isn't.

Maybe all the power is in the hands of Republicans because Democrats aren't mainstream anymore, they're extreme. Hey, now I'm clever like Nick!
Continue Reading

Gifted Journalists


The BBC, "the world's foremost news organization", sends around an instructional memo.

The Sun, Britain's biggest selling daily newspaper, reported that workers at the global broadcaster's offices in Birmingham, central England, had been issued with a memo advising them on how to get through a revolving door.

An email, sent to 800 staff -- complete with matchstick man diagrams for ease of understanding -- comes after one worker trapped her foot in the new doors at the BBC's offices in Britain's second city, cracking a toenail, The Sun said.

Employees at BBC Radio Sheffield in the north of England had previously been instructed on how to get through the often confusing and peril-laden task of boiling a kettle.

The Sun quoted the edict as saying: "Remove lid from kettle and fill kettle with water."

...and they inform us? (Via Tim Blair)

Terrorjournalism II
So, the AP photographer was coordinating with terrorists? That's the implication of the statement released by AP spokesman, Jack Stokes:

Insurgents want their stories told as much as other people and some are willing to let Iraqi photographers take their pictures. It's important to note, though, that the photographers are not "embedded" with the insurgents. They do not have to swear allegiance or otherwise join up philosophically with them just to take their pictures.

Awww, they "want their stories told". As it happens, that story was dragging two Iraqi election workers into an intersection and blowing their brains out.

When did journalism stop being a profession, and why do so-called journalists believe that their title allows them to stop fulfilling their obligations as human beings?

Terrorjournalism
Belmont Club discusses the rather disturbing habit of certain Western "journalists" to run with fanatical killers.

Even with today's proliferation of compact photographic equipment, a legitimate photojournalist rarely gets the opportunity to capture an execution. Apart from the beheadings which are purposely recorded on video by the jihadis and from gun camera film, most footage of people actually being shot are taken by photographers in company with combatants who are ready to film an ambush....It may have been pure luck, but it was surely the longest of odds that would have brought an Associated Press cameraman to the site of a surprise attack on two Iraqi electoral workers. As it was, the AP photograph was unable to capture the actual execution, only the moments shortly before and after the Iraqis were killed....It was fortunate for the AP that their photographer was accidentally there.

Sometimes they are accidentally there on purpose. In November of 2003, two French journalists from Paris Match accompanied a group of men who set out to shoot down a DHL Airbus....

Read the whole thing. Of course, no such account would be complete without mentioning CNN's open cooperation with Saddam in hiding his atrocities.

Breaking News!
I've noted before how liberals often keep levying the same charge over and over again as though it were a new discovery, in the hopes someone will finally care about their issues, or be tricked into believing they should care. Well, today on the front page of the Washington Post:

Within the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's much-discussed Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current and former intelligence officers.

They're keeping terrorism suspects imprisoned at a prison for terrorism suspects? At Guantanamo Bay? Worse yet, the article goes on to explain, the rules for their detainment are, like, vague, and stuff.

It is unclear whether the facility is still in operation today.

Front page, people. You heard it from the WaPo first.

Richard Fitzwell
The BBC: The world's foremost news agency.

BBC World said yesterday it was duped in an "elaborate deception" by a man who claimed to be a Dow Chemical Co spokesman and said the US company accepted responsibility for India's Bhopal disaster.

The British news channel, after twice running the interview with a man identified as Jude Finisterra, later said the report was wrong.

The deception was so elaborate that the Beeb was somehow prevented from checking their source. As the discussion at Tim Blair notes, "Jude Finisterra" could be roughly translated as "Jew Land Finished" or "Jews Destroy Earth".

The man's identity could not be confirmed and his motives were not immediately clear. BBC officials were not readily available for comment but the broadcaster said on air it was trying to determine what happened.

If I had to guess, I'd say they were played for fools. Remember: Don't trust blogs, because sometimes we make mistakes. Maybe we should just quit questioning the media.

Go To Video
FOX News just ran a small piece of the Ivory Coast footage. As far as I know, this is the first mainstream broadcast media acknowledgement of it's existence.

This is, what, two weeks after the blogosphere ran it into the ground? Isn't the whole point of round-the-clock television news that they're supposed to be up to the minute?

Democracy = Hitler
I'm watching Judy Woodruff on CNN promising a piece explaining why, I'm not kidding, "elections are bad for us".

Sore losers. (Also, since Alabama, apparently the only state to have had segregation ever, still has meaningless language in their law, "the beliefs of the past" must still be present. Also, a piece featuring whackjob Canadian Parliamentarian Carolyn Parrish as a reasonable sample of Canadian opinion. No mention of the fact she's just been expelled from her party, too far out for evenn the Liberals. Later: Is the Ukraine as divided as the U.S.? Why does anyone watch this?)

The Media's War on Reality
As I sit here chewing on a piece of cold turkey, I note everybody's favorite Toronto Star columnist, Antonia Zerbisias (previously known for making a fool of herself, demanding the Canadian government hire more actors so that Canadian culture isn't destroyed, and discussing her acid flashbacks). This time, she warns that if people don't stop forming opinions of their own, especially opinions that contradict those of the press, the world will implode:

Hoo-boy. It's a hot time in the old blogtown.

The pajamahadeen are firing their virtual bullets into the cyber-air in celebration of CBS anchor Dan Rather's announcement on Tuesday that he was retiring as the top talking face of the network after 24 years.

Huh? Maybe I don't read the right blogs, but I've seen little more than happy curiosity over it.

"This has been a simply outstanding month," crowed a poster on http://www.freerepublic.com. "Bush won, Arafat died, we're kicking ass in Fallujah, and now this!"

Typically, the above-quoted "Freeper" didn't get that Rather may be down, but he certainly isn't out. When he steps down as front man for The CBS Evening News on March 9, he will stay on as correspondent for the still much-watched 60 Minutes, as well as perform other assignments.

Ah, that explains it. As for 60 Minutes being "much watched", if I recall correctly, their ratings shot up in the wake of Memogate. I don't know about Antonia, but were I a journalist, I would reconsider putting that one on my resume.

As comic Jon Stewart recently pointed out, last September's 60 Minutes II fiasco, which had Rather questioning President George W. Bush's National Guard service with documents that could not be authenticated, was the only scandal of the election campaign to have merited a "-gate."

Antonia doesn't get it: It isn't that the memos "could not be authenticated", it's that they were pathetic forgeries that even totally untrained eyes could recognize after a mere cursory examination.

Which brings us to those pajamahadeen, the online brigades who claim credit for bringing those documents into question - and forcing Rather to apologize for his reporting.

As a matter of fact, Rather never actually apologized for lying to the public about the questions swirling around the documents, and continued to claim that it was in "good faith". Worse yet, he continued to insist the documents were authentic. Rather's behavior should be a standing outrage to every American media consumer. If CBS News were a car dealership, they would have their lot vandalized nightly by angry customers. Instead, they continue to manipulate the public's trust to argue that they aren't the problem here.

The right-wing bloggers proudly dubbed themselves [Pajamahadeen] - a play on muhajadeen, as in Muslim guerrilla fighters - when former CBS exec Jonathan Klein, in the wake of the scandal, complained to Fox News that "bloggers have no checks and balances.

"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances (on network news) and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

By checks and balances, Klein meant the rigours of professional journalism - and not the opinionating of the blogosphere.

Far more troubling to me is the opinionating of so-called "professional journalism". The problem with the MSM at this point is that they have erased the line between noting that there is controversy on a subject, and speculating on whether or not there should be controversy. A prime example is the video of a Marine shooting a wounded insurgent who appeared to be playing dead: Virtually everyone I've heard from, on both sides of the debate over the war, all over the world, agree that this is simply what happens on the battlefield. When the reporter who covered it, Kevin Sites, issued his own (self-important) explanation of what happened, it still just didn't blow up many skirts. Nobody cares. The "controversy" exists exclusively inside the media, and that is wrong: It is not the media's duty to create a story, nor to drive it. It is their job to report relevant facts. With the apparent exception of Salon readers, we don't "hire them" (subscribe or tune in, thus earning them their pay) to tell us what to think.

That has not prevented them from spending weeks pontificating on why their audience should care, each time inadvertantly proving that they have no grasp of the subjects on which they report.

Ironically, bloggers mostly feed off the work of professional journalists who do the legwork. But, like parasites too stupid to realize they are killing off their hosts, the pajamahadeen don't get it every time they dig more dirt for our mass grave.

Our mass grave? Blogs are merely a side effect of a growing declaration of mental indepedence from the media, as in many ways, 9/11 shattered people's willing belief in the media's portrait of the world. In a sense, many parts of American culture are going through a miniature enlightenment, where we question the conventional wisdom the media has carried and come to realizations about where we've been told wrong, where personal agendas trumped honest reporting, from Walter Cronkite's "stalemate" broadcast on the Tet Offensive to Wolf Blitzer hysterically warning us that our leaders aren't doing enough to renew the legislative atrocity known as the "assault weapons ban". Nor are the answers we find strictly in accord with Bush's policies, either. Trade, immigration, just how aggressive policy in the Middle East should be, gay marriage are all sticking points, but were not sticky enough to make a sufficient number of us do something crazy, like voting for Kerry. (In the end, polls showed only 38% of Americans were "upset" about the election result, while 55% were "happy". What should that tell us about a very significant portion of Kerry's voting bloc?)

Besides, what's this "ironic" stuff about? A journalists' job is to do the legwork, to collect facts so the rest of us can form opinions. What is Zerbisias trying to say here? That journalists can't do their jobs if their personal editorializing isn't mindlessly accepted at face value?

It's true that journalism's checks and balances have been known to fail. When they do, news organizations crash and burn in spectacular fashion. But, much like the thousands of airplanes that land safely every day and don't make the news, major disasters are few and far between.

Oddly, the people with the checks and balances keep getting the stories all wrong. By contrast, the pajamahadeen (I, for one, sleep in my underwear) keep catching it and setting them straight. It is not "few and far between" that the media totally bungles their reporting. It's "few and far between" that they actually get caught. A serial killer is still a serial killer, whether the police regard him as a suspect or not. This should tell us one of two things:

A) The media's checks and balances are a joke.

B) The media's checks and balances are designed to accomodate biased non-reporting, which is a joke.

Either way, the joke is at our expense. Let's face it: If Antonia weren't seriously concerned that the blogosphere is chipping away at the sheer scale of what the media willfully does, she wouldn't be writing this column, referring to those who dare to form their own thoughts on the news as "parasites" who are "killing off" their hosts. If she thought it were the former, and had a serious interest in improving the media, she'd instead be calling for reform, instead of warning the critics to shut up, or else.

Still, the credibility of the corporate media continues to plummet.

In March, the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism published The State of the News Media 2004, which documents an increase in superficiality and sensationalism, the declining reach of newspapers and network newscasts, cutbacks in newsroom resources and, most significantly, rising public distrust and disdain for our reportage.

Then, in June, the Canadian Media Research Consortium, a national project led by three University-based organizations to promote research on the media, (http://www.cmrcccrm.ca) came out with its Report Card On Canadian News Media. While it showed that Canadians are significantly more positive about our news sources than Americans are, citizens here believe that "powerful people or organizations" have too much influence on the media agenda.

I hope that Zerbisias isn't suggesting that Canadian media is more accurate than ours, since I'd love to have a word with her about CBC News, but given the tone of the article, that seems to be the implication. Perhaps she's merely worried about the trend of "critical thinking" that is gradually spreading through America, and what it might mean for her job at the Star should this really break out in Toronto. To go back to the 9/11 example, I repeatedly hear from a large sect of Canadians that terrorists would never attack Canada: Their foreign policy (which has magical properties, like antibacterial soap) is never criticized, universally beloved, and earns them millions of personalized fruit baskets sent twice annually by all the world. (The dead in Sudan, for example, are surely greatly comforted by the "we care" letter by the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister printed in the Toronto Star.)

Zerbisias knows, whether consciously or unconsciously, that an event (not even a terrorist attack, persay) which similarly traumatizes Canadian sensibilities could launch a social coup which would likely leave her lucky to sit with Michael Moore at parties. You may have noticed a little spray from this rising tide after the Chicoutimi debacle: Public outrage, an aborted attempt by Harper to do away with the Liberal government. Martin's people did a fine job of patting everyone on the head and making it go away, however, well enough that members of his party had the nerve to immediately call for another round of military spending cuts. From my point of view, a responsible leader would've fostered analytical thought among his followers. Ideas are what make the world go 'round. I suppose, however, that when your career depends on avoiding any revolutions in thought, there's little incentive to make people think too hard. It won't last forever, though.

And we don't know how to deal with it. Recently, for example, the news came from the U.K. that staid old papers are going tabloid, while the Washington Post will lighten up - all to attract elusive younger readers.

What about, I don't know, hiring intelligent, inquisitive people, who would then travel to places where important things are happening, interview witnesses, check information to verify accuracy, then send it home to be published, sans opinion commentary and social agenda? We could call it "journalism". Would that work? Leave the drugstore Socrates routine to the readers?

As for the newscasts of the type that Rather hosts, well, one look at the commercials for arthritis pills will tell you plenty about their demographics.

Paradoxically, young people are crowding into journalism schools, many of them in search of network TV stardom.

Specifically, young liberal people are crowding into journalism schools, just as it has been for years. They are not, however, in search of network TV stardom. The rest of the young people are getting jobs and heckling them on blogs like this one. Whether Zerbisias can't recognize this because she's so far to the left that the whole world seems to be a homogenous mash of capitalist pig dog fascism to her, or if she simply assumes that liberal is the default position and thus does not need to be specified, I don't know.

Still, the pajamahadeen are waging war on the mainstream media.

That includes the paper you're reading, even if you're not reading it on paper, since it is the actually selling of this paper which pays for the content you may now be reading gratis.

What should it tell Antonia about the value of what they do at the Toronto Star, that if they were to charge for it online, almost no one would read it anymore?

By the end of today, who knows how many bloggers will have had at this column? Many of them often shoot me down - and some do a pretty good job.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving in this country, so the Pajamahadeen raid is a little late. Sorry about that, Antonia. ALLAAAH!

But, just like trigger happy celebrants in the Middle East, who have yet to figure out that what goes up must come down, they can't see that, by firing up at us, they will also kill themselves.

In the end, Antonia's argument is like the tired old movie scene: The hero is about to do away with his archnemesis, when the villain turns, dramatic music begins to play, and he looks him in the eye: "You can't destroy me. When I killed your parents/wife/brother/children/puppy, I created you. Your life has been dedicated to stopping me, and if you finish me now, where will you find meaning? What purpose will you serve? Without me, you are nothing. Join me now and we will rule the world together."

Antonia's argument is that if we continue to dismantle the lies of the media, there will be no more liars left telling lies for us to dismantle. Somehow, I think I can live with that. However, we've got a long, long way to go, and even then, all it means is that the opinion-making will be back where it belongs: With the people. My (virtually all-consuming) hobby here isn't threatened. Antonia's job, however, sure is. Of course, it's up to us not to let that glimmer of hope die out. If we go back to sleep, we're right back where we started from.

Update: I must be on the right track. This in the Economist, then this, then this about China. Let us all fire our virtual bullets into the cyber-air in celebration.