Stuff our Media doesn't Report

At one time in our history, before corporate morality and political pandering replaced journalistic integrity, stuff like this would have made front page news. It seems like the internet has come to bloom at just about the right time. We've got a wild-west, frontier medium (for how long?) that has pried information from "approved" channels, we have portable video capture devices and the unfettered (for how long?) eyes of the citizenry. We have savants tending and screening feeds from sources with varying degrees of credibility, with the ability to manufacture information indistinguishable from raw sources. A case can be built for any point of view using the same accepted formats that previously represented themselves as fair and balanced (talking heads of authorities, video streams, polls, scientific studies, branding.) Truth has always been something we tended to accept by the channels and forms it was presented rather than verifying it for ourselves. (How do most of us know Turkenstan actually exists?) We see this echoed in our presidential race with partisan "news" channels like Fox, and we select our leaders based on how skillful their campaign is at manipulating media. Perhaps McLuhan was right all along, the medium is the message. Whatever signal that used to be there is now just one stream of noise competing with another.

(Incidently, 4 TONS of cocaine averages about what the DEA claims it seizes every quarter in their PR efforts to assure us they are winning the drug "wars". So I guess the CIA makes this statistic moot.)