A few days ago, the title Spelling Bee Gets New Queen was under the Latest News section on CNN.com. this article is about a 13 year old who took home the title of America's best speller. The competition was aired on prime-time television.

Isn't CNN supposed to inform the public of much more important breaking news? When one relies on a source such as CNN when skimming for daily news, is a topic such as the Spelling Bee Championships important enough to be on the front page?

Are we entitled to blame the general public who relies on such sources for being "dumb" when they should be aware of a current important topic, and are not? Who is the audience of CNN? Parents? Is that what CNN is doing too... molding their content according to public interest? I wonder if this will affect our intellect level in the long run...

It seems that the media is willing to not only report the news but wants to be the jury as well. This is a "right wing" report but it does bring up certain questions about the medias role in now only the war in Iraq but also in the criminal justice system. This Blog tells the story of a Representitive who held a press conference because he claims to know the outcome of the report on the Marines in Haditha. (If you don't know the story read here: www.washingtonpost.com
The media has jumped on the story proclaiming the marines guilty before any trial or court martial takes place. The rest of the blog rails against the "liberal" media but it does pose some interesting questions.

Read here www.webcommentary.com

1) The United States Constitution guarantees a fair trial beginning with the philosophy that a person is considered innocent until proven guilty. With the media reporting things like this does it make it harder for anyone to get a fair trial?

2) Is the media hypocritical when it claims that its reporting in protected by the 1st Ammedment but seems to be violating a persons 6th Ammendment.

3) Does the public's right to know outweigh the person's rights?

Is the news really the news anymore?
News, today is getting more dilute as we make progression into tomorrow’s world. More than actual fact, or real stories, the news is made up of a meticulous combination of government-produced stories, corporate sponsored stories and an industry of public relation firms at work pushing all sorts of agendas to the public.

The government has been engaged in prepackaging the news using reports that have been produced to show the government in optimal light creating segments that are made to look like real news reports, and on most occasions there is no mention that the report was paid by the government.

Public relation firms have also been hard at work pushing stories to the public by paying broadcasters, selling wars for the government and overall, generating domestic and international propaganda.

Please click this article to get to the link.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.