For example, we all know that guns kill people, but how many stories were presented in my home town paper or on the big three channels about men and women saving their own lives and the lives of their families by having a gun at hand? Only with the internet do I get the other side of the story, the story that I had known for decades was out there but had never heard from the prevailing media. Only now that I live on Guam and read the PDN (occasionally) do I see a paper which actually reports facts. And I'm rather proud of the PDN even if it’s commentary leans more to the left than my tastes would call for.

At the risk of appearing hopelessly Neanderthal, let me remark on my Doctors' Office Test for News Content: My observation is that the quality of newspapers and magazines is inversely proportional to the uselessness of the paper when picked up six months later in a lobby or waiting room. By this standard the two most useless publications are Newsweek and Time magazines. When out of date they are more pointless than even People and the Nat'l Enquirer. At least these last two do not make any representations that they are intended for anything other than 'for entertainment purposes only' whereas Time and Newsweek pretend to be thoughtful, unbiased reporters of the news.

In fact, most of what appears in these high-quality news magazines is not news at all but prognosticative speculation. And while these speculations seem pertinent at the time due to their breathless reportage, the range of possibilities they produce are so out of the realm of what is probable that when one picks up a copy months later, one is left saying, ‘Well none of that ever happened, now did it? I wonder what Brad Pitt was doing six months ago.’ There is not a fact about suspected Iraqi or Russian aircraft, naval, tank and missile deployments that is not accompanied by even more gasping questions about how this will affect events in the next few weeks or months. The same goes for page after page of reportage about everything from DHEA and HGH to the housing bubble.  But does one ever really learn anything from all the words printed in these two weekly publications? Honestly, I find no content in them which justifies cutting down all those trees. (And I am generally in favor of cutting down trees if there's a reason.)

No, being as conservative (in the non-political sense) as I am, I will mourn the loss of the printed page and the provocative locally owned and run newspaper. But I will not mourn what we have been increasingly expected to purchase: white-washed, lopsided, dumbed-down propaganda masquerading as news presented as the ethical, unbiased, objective and honest reporting that we all need and should be getting.

If you, Mrs. Saunders, lose your job because your effete newspaper (See? I didn’t say dinosaur.) withers an dies, why don’t you start your own small, hometown paper. I would like to see these proliferate. And if enough small papers required unbiased news services, I am confident that such would spring up to satisfy the demand. And a proliferation of local papers would provide a variety of competing viewpoints which is the essence of the assurances of the first amendment for the public square. This is, after all, all that the internet provides. For better or worse, they are answering the call for something better than the stock, rubber-cast reporting of the previous media.