The failure of the mass media

Zogby Sound Bites! reprints a commentary by alan Bisbort of The Valley Advocate noting that al Jazeera and the bloggers did a better job of covering the convention than the major networks did.

An excerpt:

Before examining this any further, let's take time out for a word from our sponsors: the Bloggers of America, the only news media many of us trust anymore, the only one demonstrably interested in the continued existence of our democracy. Without people like Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and Bill Scher at Liberal Oasis, we'd be sunk. Their fair and balanced coverage of the convention, and pretty much all other political events of the past three years, has trumped the combined efforts of the "professionals" in the Fourth Estate, who sit around pondering comfort levels.

I've curtailed reading American newspapers, stopped watching American news programs. All I need to know about the priorities of the nation's news networks is this: During the Democratic convention last week, Al Jazeera, the Arab world's leading news network, offered five times more live coverage than either ABC, CBS or NBC, and twice the live coverage of all three networks combined. Think about the disgrace in that fact. Arabs are more informed about American democracy than American voters.