WTF Is It Now?!?

'Americans ill-served by own media'
The media's failure to serve the public interest helps explain why, as the Internet audience-measurement company Nielsen NetRatings revealed last month, Americans are turning more and more to news sites outside the country for a more accurate and balanced picture of the world. How else would they have learned, for example, that, as reported by the London Observer on Sunday, the U.S. government had pulled out its bag of "dirty tricks" to spy on recalcitrant members of the United Nations Security Council?

The U.S. mainstream media - in the past few days alone - have also largely ignored reports by the brave and brilliant British correspondent Robert Fisk exposing how CNN ("By Appointment To The Pentagon") war reports will undergo a new and especially rigorous screening process and how doubts have been cast on the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has been mysteriously promoted from a minor scowling face on the FBI's terrorist list to, as MSNBC put it the other day, "Al Qaeda's CEO."

Wrote Debra Pickett, a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times: "The cynical view on this is that Mohammed is still the relatively small fish we were first told he was, but the news of his arrest is being hyped because the Bush administration needs a victory in the war on terrorism before going to war in Iraq." - from Antonia Zerbisias' column in the Toronto Star.