As my first OP (and I'm not even sure I can get my point across properly)

[Jack Rabbit]

50. We've allowed ourselves to be trained by the teevee

I'm 63 and can remember when watching a network newscast left one feeling like an informed citizen. I remember my parents and older sister watching Edward R. Murrow when I was way too small to understand what he was talking about. I watched Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley cover a presidential assassination, the War against Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. That was television news at its zenith. After Watergate, the quality of television news declined steadily until it reached its nadir during the Clinton Administration and helped the GOP make a constitutional crisis out of a shady real estate deal where the President was clearly bilked and a tacky blow job that really had nothing to do with it. It hasn't recovered from that since and still presents two sides of an argument where there are not legitimately two sides.

It didn't take much digging to tell the Bushies were lying out of their teeth during the run up to the War against Iraq. Did the White House press corps do any digging? No. Instead, they rewrote White House press releases and passed them off as "the way it is."

Meanwhile, I had killed my teevee and started getting news on the Net. I was aware of this, this and this, as well as intelligence that Saddam destroyed his biochemical arsenal after the first Gulf War. Those matters weren't discussed much in the American mainstream media, a category from which I have excluded FoxNews.