For a cogent account of how our perfidious press encourages witnesses to lie or to refuse to testify at all and thus distorts reality, see this report.
If I recall correctly Mark Twain said something to the effect that if you don't read the newspapers you will be uninformed and that if you do read them you will be misinformed.
He of course had no idea of how truly dangerous the big media -- the nation's major newspapers and broadcast networks -- would and have become today. The menace that they pose to our society is substantial but offset to some extent by their having forfeited their credibility with their ideologically biased reporting.
The big media's retention of any meaningful portion of the ability to set the nation's agenda that they formerly enjoyed as the public's sole source of information will depend on the extent to which their increasingly skeptical audience continues to diminish as it turns to the multiple sources of news available on the internet. In any event though, the shattering of the elite press's corruptly misused monopoly over news is good news indeed.
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