Maybe it’s the yawning division between those who devoutly admire the president and those would like to see him garroted, or the war coverage, or the recently relaxed regulations on media ownership, but it seems like half the news I read these days is about the news. Everyone is suddenly aware of the tortuous route information takes before it reaches the public (whatever that is), and how many (or how few) people are standing in the switchyards giving some stories top coverage while consigning others to the scrapyard. At every stage a little bit of spin is added in one direction or the other, and if you’re a reasonably conscientious reader you find yourself, more often than not, in the position of a quantum physicist trying to make sense of a cloud chamber full of trails.

I’m not especially sympathetic to anyone who claims that the right, or the left, is trying to take over the media and turn everyone into mindless automatons. First, the people who raise these claims are more often than not on the fringe, and the first thing anyone should know about the fringe is that since they themselves live lives possessed by agendas, they can rarely distinguish between bias and agenda and tend to assume that anyone who believes something will, like them, spend every waking minute trying to squash opposing views. Second, it’s only people whose own ideologies are ill-founded and basically aesthetic who seriously think that listening to XXXX-wing propaganda will deprive a person of their reason and free will.

In fact, though I hardly like to see anyone paying good money in order to consume the crassness and naivete that seems to sell so well, nor anyone making a cent for digging up shit and calling it chateau briand or even hamburger, I am almost completely unbothered by media conglomeration and bias. James Fallows has an excellent article in The Atlantic on the rise of Rupert Murdoch, who represents a significant break from the journalistic tradition espoused by Joseph Pulitzer at the beginning of the last century: the notion that journalists have a civic responsibility to present news in an objective, unbiased way so that the public can make informed decisions (mind, Pulitzer was no stranger to yellow journalism). This idea is in contrast to what came before it, namely that newspapers should present the viewpoint of a particular group, and Murdoch’s strategy of selling news to make money.

Indifference and even-handedness are, of course, nice sentiments, and ones that are absolutely essential to the rule of law. Insofar as the FCC is distributing a limited and extraordinarily valuable resource, it should take care to make bandwidth available to any viewpoint. But equality before the law is not the same thing as the mystique of objectivity with which journalists have surrounded themselves. That objectivity is simply not there, and it’s irresponsible to give credence to the news as if it were. Perhaps it would be better if bias were more obvious. Doubt, after all, is the beginning of knowledge.

The alternative to picking a single news source on aesthetic or ideological grounds is to read a lot of news from a lot of sources and piece something together. But this is difficult, time-consuming, and if like me you don’t have an eidetic memory, more than a little overwhelming. I read probably three or four opinion pieces a day, about twice as many general reportage articles, and a whole pile of headlines, and at the end of it all I can usually remember only the general gist of one or two of the articles. To assemble several news sources into a (relatively) serious piece of thought like this adds at least another hour of writing and research. The end result being yet another hastily written, poorly researched, hopelessly opinioned contribution to the stupidly named “blogosphere” regarding the fecking media. Some disciple of Derrida probably just had an orgasm; I’m just discouraged.