Immediately after 9/11 the media estimated a death toll of 40,000.  It came closer to 3,000.

After Katrina hit we heard stories of the National Guard needing 25,000 body bags.  The real need was closer to 1,000.

These were epic tragedies and I do not mean to minimize them, but the media should have some sense of repsonsibility to be realistic in their reporting.

In this thorough article in National Review, Lou Dolinar shows how the media again grossly exaggerated in reporting  the effects of the Gulf oil spill.

Excerpt from Our Real Gulf Disaster:

With the nation and its leaders looking for facts, we got instead a massive plume of apocalyptic mythology and threats of Armageddon. In the Gulf, this misinformation has cost jobs, lowered property values, and devastated tourism, and its effects on national policy could be deep and far-reaching.

Read the whole article.

According to the July 26, 2010 print version of Newsweek:

There are 141 million active blogs, up from a mere 12,000 ten years ago.

Daily e-mails are up 20 fold from 12 to 247 billion in the same period.

Daily Google searches are up 20 fold to 2 billion.

Text messages are up from 400,000 to 4.5 billion.

We spend six times as much time online; from 2.7 hours a week to 18 hours per week.

The cost of hard-drive storage has dropped from $10 to 6 cents per gigabyte.

Yet daily letters mailed has dropped only a little 207.88 billion to 175.67 billion, the number of daily newspapers from 1,480 to 1,302.

What does all this mean?  I really don’t know, but the cynic in me doubts that we’re better informed as a result, but I could be wrong.  More data, more information, and more opinions do not automatically translate into more wisdom.  In fact the more we are overloaded with information the more we seemed starved for wisdom.

I do think that we are defining some new sense of community especially when the new social media are thrown in. It is distant enough to be less likely to be civil that personal contact, but the individualized nature lets everyone set rules of conduct.  It is so much easier to stay in touch with friends and family there may be some real positive impacts on family and community networks.

How this digital community affects communities that are geographically defined will be interesting to see.

I have a default position to disbelieve conspiracy theories.  Secrets are just too hard to keep.

While I find individual reporters may be biased in their coverage, I expect the larger organization to balance bias, although the dominance of so many Democrats (or any single party for that matter)  in the MSM makes this difficult.

The release of the JournoList, a group of 400 journalists from some of the top new organizations should be far more disturbing that most will see it.  When top reporters exchange ideas to promote one candidate and disparage another, this betrays a fundamental trust in a free press.

It is one thing for an opinion columnists or pundit, whether it is Keith Olbermann or Glenn Beck, to espouse whatever bias they choose; but it is another for a reporter for a major outlet to conspire with others in a similar position to intentionally mislead the public about a candidate.

It highlights a chasm of morality in the profession that is only justified in their narrow little minds by their arrogance and delusions of moral supremacy.

They should be treated like a professional athlete who intentionally throws the game for money: they should be barred from the game for life.

When Charlie Gibson with ABC News acted ignorant of the booming ACORN corruption story while it was breaking, the pundits on the right were stunned that a major new anchor could be so insulated that he could miss such a story.

The rumors of John Edward’s notorious affair was buzzing in the alternate media for months before it was broken by….. the National Enquirer.  Yet the New York Times did not seem to hesitate to give front page coverage to a rumor about an affair between John McCain and a colleague that proved untrue.

Critics of those that oppose the health care proposals, fearing death panels and rationing, are deemed liars and paranoid lunatics, yet they are reacting to the actual words spoken and written by the likes of Robert Reich and Ezekial Emmanuel (Rahm’s brother), and others.

The proliferation of media outlets has drowned us in information. While many question the lack of professional credentials on the internet it seems to me that the professional media has much to answer for.  It was Dan Rather who reported lies about Bush that was discovered by an internet amateur, It was the New York Tines printing lies about McCain, It was Gibson at ABC who knew nothing about ACORN and it was all of them ignoring what so many already knew about Edwards.

Even at a professional level , reporters hear and see what they expect to see and hear- what they want to see and hear.  And with a media centered in locations far from the heartland, educated at universities far from the heartland, they tend to surround themselves with like minded professionals whose collective universe is far from the heartland.  Like media consumers the professionals tend to read for confirmation not information.

They are like a school of fish swimming in the same direction, fearing that the errant independent fish will end up on a hook.  Responding to a question as to how a media professional can miss a story in what appears to be an obviously biased fashion, Bernard Goldberg noted, “Does a fish know he is wet?”

It is a perfect metaphor for a media that is oblivious to a world it is centered in but cannot see.

Carrie O’Connell writes in American Thinker “I am not supposed to exist” read the entire article here.

A 26 year pro life Catholic woman, Carrie writes how her profile is totally absent from the collection of media stereotypes either in the news or in the entertainment sector, which  has become more difficult to distinguish.  She basically described herself as intelligent, educated, thoughtful and conservative- yet young and female.

The reason her article struck me is that it explained why one side is so surprised at the election outcomes.  When a voter profile that did not exist, or is deemed to be an extreme minority, sweeps an election, the other side is stunned.  They then dream up conspiracy theories and elitist stereotypes to explain the totally illogical outcome. They write involved analysis such “What’s the Matter with Kansas” to explain why Americans vote conservative even when it is against their best interests to do so (in the writer’s judgment).

This becomes even more true as the left and right isolates themselves further in their own media bubble, shutting out reasonable voices from the other side.   Without some cross pollination from the different camps there is no middle.

Whether you agree with Ms. O’Connell’s opinion is less relevant than the fact that many do not realize that her opinion exists, at least not in her demographic sector.

Some excerpts from her article:

“If I based my identity on how I see women my age represented on television and in the movies, my only conclusion is that I am not supposed to exist.”

“I don’t have cable television or an iPhone and I do not feel entitled to either. I do not feel that the government should have to provide me with necessities while I refuse to give up luxuries.”

“If I was voting on popularity and glamour, I would phone American Idol, not visit the ballot box.”

“Educated, well-read women who are pro-life are never written into character plots. I am told time and time again that art imitates life. When will they stop thinning the paint?”