<sarcasm> There is no media bias. 

I don't know why people keep saying there is.<sarcasm off>

There was a guest on TVO's great public affairs show The Agenda last night, claiming that only 'professional' journalists can be trusted. (Watch it here).

His message was that bloggers are just a bunch of amateurs who might bend the facts or bias their reports to try to influence readers.  People have to be careful about trusting information they find on the web.

He didn't like the internet much at all.  There's no editor to decide what is important or to put things in priority order.  Nobody is deciding which subjects merit lots of coverage and which merit little to none.

Heck, in Wikipedia they give as much space to Truthiness as they do to Truth.  Pamela Anderson gets as big an entry as Marie Curie!

There's no gatekeeper, you see.  That upsets intellectual snobs and arrogant media types who think they are the ones who know what is best for you - to know.

Who says Marie Curie is more important than Pamela Anderson?  As long as people are interested in something, I'm happy.  As long as they are making an effort to learn about a subject, it's a good thing.  They might branch out into more erudite pursuits or they might not.  Either way, they'll know something about whatever intrigues them and they'll have researched it themselves.

Parents sometimes complain because their kids are reading comic books.  My usual response is that if they are reading at all, you're lucky.  Let them read cereal boxes (hey, that's how I started learning French as a kid), who cares?  What could turn kids off more quickly than making them wade through books like Crime and Punishment (which most parents haven't read) instead of being free to choose.  Trust me, they'll move on, as long as reading is fun and rewarding.

Democracy only works when citizens have access to information, when they can disseminate information and when they can comment on information without constraint. 

Some corporate and political organizations aren't too keen on that concept.

The internet is like the greatest democratic society in history, especially the blogosphere.  If blogs are so suspect and unreliable, then why are all the newsies running (dull) blogs now?  Why are the newspapers soliciting comments about their online articles, something they copied from bloggers?  Why are they referring to bloggers and in many cases being scooped by bloggers?  For that matter, why do I constantly find errors in mainstream news reports but rarely on blogs?

The reason media types (like the guest on The Agenda last night) like to badmouth the amateurs is because they are afraid.  The one thing they fear more than a loss of status or a loss of advertising revenue is a free, unfettered world of information like the internet which allows people to bypass the gatekeepers, get their own facts and form, and even publish, their own opinions.

Anyway, back to my subject - the 'professional' media.  Did you see the Star today?

No?  Well, this was their front page:

Here's an example of their 'professional' reporting:

Neither of the comments attributed to Prime Minister Harper,  'drop dead' or 'don't bother asking' were actually spoken by him.

So much for our champions of accurate, unbiased and reliable reporting, eh?

My friend Cathy has a headline suggestion for tomorrow:

PM to Toronto Star:  Lawyer Up