Sounds like the kind of news coverage countries like China and the old USSR was rightly scorned for having.

With the Internet, it becomes increasingly hard to keep a country hermetically sealed against what is happening outside its borders, but I suppose they still try in some places. And the trouble is that most people still seem to depend on the mass media to tell them what is going on and what to think about it.

I can understand that for people who aren't in a position to find out for themselves - but that can't apply in the United States, where figures in May last year indicated that 165.2 million people had Internet access.