"The main stream media is a business, it is not in business to sell information or education, it is in business to sell advertising minutes or column inches. If the conservatives don't like it they have no one to blame but their own mercantilistic view of the universe."

You want to give credit to the conservatives for MSM?? Of course the conservative would happy to take that praise. Compared to a purer socialistic/commie rag/broadcast, MSM looks not too bad.

"The media gives us more information on Brad and Jennifer and Angelina, and Michael Jackson (when he was in season) than it does on real news because that's what it's marketing surveys tell it people are really interested in."

Lot's people like to eat bread, does that mean we should only get bread? Sounds pretter much like idea a socialist would propose. No the reason is simplier- incompetence and lack of market forces. If you lower the cost of getting information, we will get more information. And those who can't get enough of Brad and Jennifier can watch that all day long- a whole channel, no wait 10 or a 100 channels can focus on this crap. We are at the beginning of the end of Brad, Jennifer, Angelina, ect info commerical/news era.

"Even now, we are fed a constant diet of inspiring stories about kittens rescued from rooftops and plucky special olympic kids while the world goes straight to hell. If you don't like the news, don't worry, it won't be long before there won't be any more news at all, and we'll all have one endless, beautifully produced infomercial to watch to the last syllable of recorded time. I gotta go."

Oh, we all already have the endless informercial- lot's people are long term fans of the Home Shopping Network. And my cable with it's 500 plus channels is mostly full of crap- which probably far too many people find interesting [hence the need to channel surf past it all]. I haven't yet found the channel that is solid Superbowl type ads, but no doubt it will come [can you imagine having commericals breaks for the superbowl type ad programming- oh, I'm sure it's coming.] But the old idea of commerical breaks is simply too inefficent and TeVo might be blamed for it's end, but it was going to happen anyway.