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THE SMELL OF DEATH THAT SURROUNDS US --

You get used to a certain level of whining, no matter what your natural inclinations. For a long time I've been tolerating a certain level of whining about media bias... yada yada liberal asshats yada yada. You know the usual complaints.

And... there is a distant but certain truth to all of it.

But I have always discounted a large part of the right leaning whiners' claims of an organized media bias because I don't believe that there is any actual "conspiracy" at work. Conspiracy implies some sort of organized and intelligent control with intent, and I've never given the moonbats that much credit. I suppose it's because I have always worked in large institutions like schools and universities and state agencies and courthouses. My bail bond business always had a focal point of the courts and you couldn't ask for a more out of control bunch of loonies than the cops and the courts. The courts define the notion of human error. And, schools by definition are chaotic. Those idiots couldn't conspire their way out of a wet paper sack. I still believe that. We all depend of a certain high level of organizational incompetence. Jeez... the last time the government (especially the government) was capable of getting the trains to run on time they killed half of the Nation of Israel and heaped corpses up to the sky. Imagine if the SS was running the liberal press. Yikes!

What we have always counted on is that there is no evil intent to do harm or to defraud. I know it happens, but most people intuitively know that good pushes out bad and that most of us want to do the right thing. It's one of those givens, from the time of Plato... that if man knows the right he will strive to achieve it. Always. So where does this crap come from? Huh?

We may disapprove of Mr. Kerry and his politics, but I don't hear anyone coming up with criminal intent charges, just rabid biases. I may not wish him well and I certainly don't intend to vote for him, but I haven't got the energy that it would take to actively oppose him because I believe that he is a dingbat and a loser and has the wrong end of the stick. Would I deliberately try to quash a report of something that he did that I might find good? Nope. I wish he would spend more time trying to find things that we agree on. Heck, he might wind up voting Republican. I can dream, can't I? But suppress the truth? Not me. That wouldn't be playing fair and if we have to stoop to cheating then the game is not worth the prize. Is it?

What I'm trying to say is that while I agree generally with the bias claims I have, until recently, inclined to think that the consipracy whispers are an example of "crying wolf too much". But...

Yeah... there's a but.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a human interest story about the Prez stopping on the campaign trail when he heard a kid admit to losing her mom at the twin towers to the terrorists on 9/11 and the President of the United States took a moment to talk to the girl and her father, give the kid a hug, and actually came across as a decent and compassionate man, a father who cares about a child's grief. Come on guys, that was one of those golden moments of human interest and it should have been on every TV screen in America. You've got to be made of granite to not get misty over that kind of heart tug. Was there one? Nope. Other than the local paper the only place you might have heard about it was in the trusty ole blogosphere. Come on! This shit should sell papers. I mean... tons and tons of papers. TV. Guest shots on Oprah. I mean... come on!

Well, OK... they missed it and you can't got it back and if you try to recreate something like that without killing the goose it will turn to poison and bite you in the ass. So it went on by.

Now we come to this.

Sgt.Hook has another absolutely solid gold human interest story that should sell to any... I mean ANY... market. Have you seen the story anywhere else in the media? Nope.

Now suddenly, I'm getting a little queasy about the free market of ideas. I'm beginning to seriously think that if it wasn't for the trusty blogosphere there would be NO exchange of ideas. That's scarey. That's like saying that the traditional media shills are deliberately avoiding any news that might make the Prez look good.

Scarey.

I'd like to think that the Office has more power than this. I'd like to think that the President of the United States has sufficient clout to Make News no matter what the biases of the vendors.

I'm on the edge of admitting that I'm a polyanna. Does tnis mean that all those conspiracy loonies that I have shrugged off as wholesale bullshit might have had a whisper of truth? Shudder.

Can we, as a culture, afford to have a radically negative skewed market such as this? And what is it that supports this shoddy workmanship? And how long can this nasty little secret be maintained?

The traditional answer in most marketplace imbalances is that good work pushes out bad. But how long is it going to take for poor reportage to die the slow death... and where is the good reportage that should replace it? Could it be that the only responsible reporting a person can get in America is on the Internet? Does this mean that GutrumbleRob and Velociman and SgtHook and the Belmont Club represent the future of journalism. I guess so.

Imagine a world where the only way the average guy can taste the Truth unadorned is at the gentle hands of Acidman or Sgt. Hook. That does seem to have a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Bob