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I love alternative media. I spent the past week out of town, and fell into a media blackout where I didn't see any news stories about the election, or gas prices, or the war, or fires, or any other number of issues affecting us. Now I almost never watch network news, but when I returned I decided to turn it on while unpacking. While I wasn't necessarily expecting gound-breaking award winning journalism from the NBC Channel Whatever News at 10:00 that happened to come up first on my television, I had the reasonable expection that the program would cover the relevant news stories, in a moderately in-depth manner. This turned out to be an unreasonable expection. Instead, there was a feature story on the two potential first ladies. Not on their politics, or their issues of interest, or their roles in the campaigns, but on their clothing designers. We are in the midst of an historic, important, interesting, meaningful election period, and one of the top stories promulgated by the main stream press is that Oscar de la Renta is the preferred designer of the Bush women, McCain's wife, and Obama's wife. And, a special piece on how Hollywood glamorous Mrs. McCain is looking nowadays. I was reminded why I don't tend to watch network news. My point is not to lament about the mainstream press and expose their journalistic frailities, but rather to applaud the efforts of other, independent news sources that do focus on important topics in a thoughtful way. Thankfully there are plenty of other resources available, that don't fall victim to the sensationalist, "if it bleeds it leads", horse-race type of reporting characteristic of the main network news stations. Whether one considers him/herself progressive, conservative, leftist, rightist, centrist, independent, communist, anarchist, libertarian, etc..., there are plenty of sites and resources out there that do an amazingly better job of uncovering and reporting on news stories than the networks. Some sites I like to frequent are commondreams.org, projectcensored.org, freedomhouse.org, motherjones.com, thenation.com, hightowerlowdown.org, and of course, polzoo.com to name a few. Let the networks discuss the merits of how nice G.W.'s daughter looked in her designer wedding gown. I'm going elsewhere.
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