MSM

As a small town hick, I rely on the mainstream media, the MSM, for a lot of my information. We're not a savvy lot, we hicks. We don't surf a lot, we don't know the trendy websites. We get our fix from CBS and the New York Times.
Which is why we tend to get anxious over Rather and Martin's Laugh-In.
They have lied to us. We know that they have lied to us. And nobody cares.
The government doesn't care - unless the lies are not in their favor. The bloggers crow every time they catch someone in a lie, and predict the end of the MSM.
Dream on, bloggers. You are an elite. The best known among you gather perhaps 100,000 hits, all of them high-end netsurfers like yourselves.
We hicks, we working class bums who have other people program our VCRs and still listen to FM radio, we number in the hundreds of millions.
We're the people who elect governments. We're the ones you elite are counting on to elect a good and wise president in a few years.
And we do not trust anything we hear anymore.
Are Republicans a corrupt bunch of cronies - or an unjustly accused bend of patriots? I've seen both arguments. Both offer proof.
One side is lying. And we have no way - NO WAY - to discover which.
We do not meet the candidates. Those of us who live in Utah or New Mexico cannot afford to take time off to visit Washington and see these people in person. Hell, those of us who live in Baltimore don't have the time.
We don't have the time or money to go to New Orleans and see for ourselves what's going on.
We don't have the documents to screen Miers, or DeLay.
We don't know.

And yet we must know. Democracy is based on the idea that the common people make the decisions. An uninformed decision is a bad decision. And we remain uninformed.

We need the MSM. We need a working MSM. Blogs are fine for some things, but a broadsheet called "Crush the Democrat Traitors", seen by 20 people a month, is not going to fill the gap of a missing news medium.