Network news, 24-hr cable news, & major newspapers are all profit-driven & therefore don’t act in the public interest.

Don’t get me wrong, i’m not advocating for a gov’t takeover of the media – but until we can figure out a way to remove the profit motive from journalism, we will not be a well served citizenry & will continue to be fear-bated (“don’t let your child be the next victim”, “women, you can’t afford to miss this report”, “could it happen in your neighborhood? – tune in at 10pm”, etc)

Fear enduces emotional rather than logical responses & therefore will always work to our detriment. Anyone who hasn’t seen “Bowling For Columbine” – i urge you to see it. It opened my eyes.

Instead of fearing terrorism & reducing our freedoms & liberties, we should be working to reduce the demand for terrorist acts. Just like the failed “war on drugs” – focusing solely on stopping supply will not work. Let’s learn that lesson from our past failure & apply it to this “war on terrorism” before it’s too late.

Your phrasing implies you don’t think news from Bush and Cheney is objective. What, then, do you consider objective?

If you say MSM, then I’d have to force you to be more specific, as MSM covers a lot of things.

If you say AP, or NYT, or WaPo, or WSJ, or FoxNews, or any other single outlet, we could debate the objectivity of any of these until we lost interest without consensus, as each is represented by many individuals, from reporters to editors. Generally, the more specific we get, the better a case we could make one way or the other for objectivity. In the end, we’d have a complex landscape of shysters, honest witnesses, layabouts, cowards, heroes, demagogues, thinktankers, and scholars.

Which seems to put us right back at the start. Given a huge array of information of varying verisimilitude from sources of varying repute, I’m inclined to throw up my hands to some extent and rely on a general read – but your personal filters and mine may cause each of us to come up with very different general reads. It’s a chaotic system, mathematically speaking; final outcome is sensitively dependent upon our initial conditions.

And once again, right now, I’m still much less inclined to worry about someone who says he wants to check my phone records (which the phone company has anyway) than someone who says he wants to blow me up.

The NSA contends that they are simply looking for “patterns” in the massive database of telephone numbers they have collected. In fact, the kinds of patterns NSA analysts are looking for may be the key to winning the War on Terror.

The trouble I have, which is the trouble I’ve had for years and years now, is that I could say the exact same thing about the press. Gee, I can be fearful of terrorist activity, or I could be fearful of my government. In some sense, it’s a wash – so my gut says fearing terrorists is still wiser for the time being.