Martin Gibson, how predictable you are. In this discussion you try to win a debate by bashing everyone else's reasoned contributions instead of offering well-documented useful commentary of your own. Do you think you're somehow coming out on top with this kind of strategy? You camp out on a thread and trash and insult anyone you don't agree with, and the thread participation ends due to the frustation of those who give up trying to talk while you're around. Insults about learning to think for one's self don't make me look less capable in the conversation, they make you look mentally puny and defensive.

Compare an hour of news on one of the big three and on NPR and you will find the substance on NPR every time. This morning I had the ABC's Good Morning America on for a little while, but quit trying to take it seriously as a source of news because the pro-American and European slant in the telling of the story of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean was enough to gag me. It's like the folks at ABC assume all of the natives look alike so no one here will be able to follow the story. So we learn about one white family from Salt Lake City that lost a daughter. We followed them for several minutes and they searched and came to the grim realization she had indeed died. This is too bad, but it is a tiny part of the story, and all things considered, they were luckier than most. Then the network was going to go to the story of how a Sports Illustrated super model survived the flood. Give me a break--are we going to peer at her closely to see if her $20,000 a day face was marred in the water? One hundred forty-four thousand people so far have died in that disaster, a fraction of one percent of them were white. Yet the coverage on the news, with any "human interest" angle, is of white American or Euro families. NPR gives the story of a wider ranging group of people, and doesn't fawn on a few English-speaking folks (makes the story go much easier on tv if there is no translator or captioning needed).

It's the same with many other topics. Last summer: why should I have bothered to watch the Olympics on American TV? They only followed American athletes, but I wanted to see or hear what others from around the world were doing. You get some good reports on Public Radio, and you get good reports from the world press.

Bobert is right. It's the money that talks on American news channels. So it's not news at all, it's hype and pablum dumbed down for an increasingly dumbed down American public.

SRS