The real story here is not that Sean Hannity is a racist scumbag --- we have known that for years --- but that he and most other media figures are nearly invulnerable to attack. They have the privilege of asking candidates tough questions (or, more often, simply hostile ones), but who ever gets to ask them questions? Only other TV people, and of course then only in the spirit of great camaraderie and with many shared interests.

I believe this situation will have to change. Media people, especially onscreen TV anchors and other presenters, along with their editors, exert near total control over many or most people's knowledge and opinions, not only about politics, but also about products, entertainment, social trends, books and so on.

I can't imagine that our constitution would have allowed such a lopsided distribution of media power if television or radio had existed at the time the document was written. Instead, the framers would have invented some kind of separation of powers within the media world, as they did in the political sphere. This problem has worsened over the years, and now we badly need some kind of governmental or quasi-governmental structure to prevent long-term patterns of gross media lies and bias.

Reading this, people will cry, "First Amendment!" --- but the whole Constitution, first amendment and all, is basically inoperative now anyway, mainly because of exactly such runaway media problems. We have to find some kind of new synthesis. The original First Amendment was designed to protect local newspapers and pamphleteers against political control by government, but the framers could not have imagined that small groups of extremely wealthy people could end up controlling the eyes and ears of masses of ordinary people all across the country.

Excellent post Ralph. I'll expand on a few of your points, all of which I agree with.

TV anchors can not only ask hostile or hardball questions of those they disagree with, they can, and do, ask lightweight softball questions of those they agree with. Worse yet, they don't ask questions at all. When the media doesn't ask the right questoins, you wind up with soldiers in Iraq. The Media has seriously let us down over the past eight years.

The internet has provided a mechanism for getting stories that are being ignored by the MSM. BradBlog is a prime example. The Church of Scientology is having problems because people have used the internet to get the truth out there.

Until we have a Net Neutrality Law on the books I will worry about how much longer the current freedom of speech on the internet will last. The Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology used by Comcast to censor P2P traffic (they call it throttling, a much nicer name than censoring) can be used to censor anything you want. It's just software.

Consider that old media (aka MSM, aka lame scream media) is gravely concerned that they are losing control. The internet frightens the bejesus out of them. It allows people to communicate with each other to share information indescriminantly. Wow! That's some really scary shit. Well, it is for them and the government.

They want their total control of the information flow back. They preferred the broadcast style of information delivery. That method provides central editorial control which means that topics you don't want mentioned, such as election integrity, can be suppressed.

Companies such as Phorm and NebuAd, use DPI to provide 'targeted advertising'. The DPI box, located at your ISP, has all your internet traffic going through it. The box uses DPI to figure out what web sites you visit and adjusts the advertising sent to you accordingly. In other words, your ISP gets to spy on all of your internet activity. Lovely. Even better, with a software upgrade and the same box can do network management. In this instance network management and throttling are euphemisms for censoring.

This stuff gives me nightmares. So do electronic voting machines.

BTW, I am an engineer. (Electronics and Software)

It had to have been a lawyer that suggested electronic voting machines would be cool. Every engineer I've ever asked what they thought about electronic voting machines has had the same answer: VERY BAD IDEA!

Internet = Liberty poles, you see they had this problem before during Washington and Adams terms.

Thank Tom Jeff then and Al Gore now

oh and fuck Sean Inanity

It is very interesting to read this stuff ... happily I can read it.

I'm no good when it comes to reading Chinese or Arabic, or speaking either.

I hope you Libby's are taking advantage of Rosetta Stone, like I am. I want to be able to converse and understand our conquers while you guys have your thumbs up your whatever's in awe that our ideology and reason for being could be so compromised!! Thanks a lot!!

Nothing Shawn hannity, rush Limbaugh, mark {the idiot}Levin surprise me. I am shocked that it took average good white Americans this long to see threw these fake cowards! are you kidding me? these UN-patriotic opportunistic wack jobs are transparent to black people in general. we were NEVER fooled by these cowards. so good white people will have to step up there awareness of these idiot types and CALL THEM OUT! these are weak, bigoted, very divisive figures that should have no place in America!