A lot of ink is spilled on Katie Couric, Anderson Cooper, etc., but it all washes over me. My news intake tends to be NPR headlines upon wake-up, a read through the NY Times, occasional visits to its website, and maybe a bit of Headline News or local station NY1 if something big (and tele-visual) is going down. [Somehow, when I tune to CNN in the evening, I can't avoid running into the irritating Nancy Grace or the vapid Showbiz Tonight.] Otherwise, I could care less about the network telecasts, who's on first, who's being shuffled or passed over, etc. Am I overly cynical about TV news? Should I be watching? Is TV your primary news source, and, if not, what is? Are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert enough to acquaint you with the issues of the day?

I usually get my news from NPR and internet. I'll watch the local news here and there, mostly for sports stuff. I'll rarely watch the national news though, unless something major is going on. Even then I'm more likely to check out NPR first.

I guess Katie Couric really plays in Middle America because I can't fathom why she makes such ungodly fist fulls of money. I've always gathered my news from a variety of sources (and unlike the consensus here, I don't put exclusive stock in NPR), so network talking heads don't have great currency in my home. I saw about 30 seconds of Nancy Grace today in passing and I still feel dirty.

I get most of my news from the internet. However, I still like to tune into the first 10 minutes of NBC Nightly New with Brian Williams to see what the mainstream news shows are covering as the lead stories. Even if I miss a heated exchange on a show, there are nice sites on the internet that post the videos.

Don't waste your time with alleged "mainstream media" sources. You get better information from blogs and from shows like THE DAILY SHOW and REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER. Web sites like Media Matters for America have shown me how idiotic, lazy and conservative the "MSM" has become.

"Don't waste your time with alleged "mainstream media" sources. You get better information from blogs and from shows like THE DAILY SHOW and REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER. Web sites like Media Matters for America have shown me how idiotic, lazy and conservative the "MSM" has become."

Sometimes John Stewart and Bill Maher can be just as obvious as any other show that is out there. They can pick apart the news. I like that. But as a source are they really that much better?

Before WWII and even The Depression, there was no un-biased news. Most or all papers ran some wild and untrue stories out there. The great satirist Mark Twain earned a living writing these things. Hawks invade Chicago. Wild West stories. Yellow Journalism. A person suscribed as much to a point of view as one did for news. Remember those movies like HIS GIRL FRIDAY? All of the reporters are drunks doomed to be copy boys.

At some point (my guess is the 1920s and 30s), the advertisments put pressure on high circulation news papers for some fact checking. With WWII and The Cold War the slate was Pro-USA but also fairly unbiased (The New York Times, The Wahsington Post).

Now we have seen a return to old form. We are subscribing to a point of view. Not facts but a presentation of facts. The theory of the facts or news. There is also a point when News shows are no longer News shows. I don't know what to call it but it has surpassed news. Its more like news about news shows. Or Entertainment Tonight with a political slant. Gossip. Not much there.

Fortunately we still have reasonable quality and relatively impartial T.V. news here in the U.K.

Sky News is very good which is astonishing considering it's owned by Rupert Murdoch. My jaw is left flapping any time I tune into Fox News...it's like a republican propaganda channel.