Not only do I find myself shaking my head at the "TV truth" we're subjected to, I'm positively insensed at the dumbing down policy of the media.
So much of the media is in the hands of a small group of people whose main concern is viewing figures. Possibly due to the shameful dumbing down in education, viewing figures for political programmes have been dropping off steadily for the past 20 years, at a rate which is reflected in election turn-outs for people under 50 years-old, and the news groups reacted by re-packaging the news into sound bites and stock quotes in order to popularise the news.
As a result, the more news you watch, the less informed you are.
There are, as has been shown here, a few voices in the darkness, but as a society in general, we are uneducated and uninformed with regard to world events giving the Bush/Blair administrations the perfect opportunity to raise a political smokescreen on the back of the terror attacks to wrest control of the precious oil supplies they covet.
The TV and other media organisations aren't going to start making hard news programmes until they feel a demand from the viewers, and the viewers, in general, aren't going to demand because they're conditioned to watching news in 5-second sound-bites and have grown to feel unengaged by world events. The sudden upsurge of interest following the Sep-11 attack and the subsequent "war on terror" has created a problem for the media, in as far as they have needed to bring people up to speed with regard to middle-east relations, cultural and religious matters, in order to paint a back-drop for the military images that have been "manna from heaven" to the programme makers.
Not easy to pack all that background information into little,5-second bite-size lumps between advertisements and who's going to want to listen to some political commentater questioning the ethics of what we're doing when there's all this great footage of tanks and soldiers.