I don't like Bill O'Reilly, and despite his reasonable-- even humorous-- appearance on The Daily Show, I think he is utterly full of himself and uses his faux-independant political position to make claims about his impartial questioning that don't really hold water. Jon Stewart is there to entertain, and he did, but I wish he would have pressed BO'R on his bogus comments about CC viewers and some of this super-softball questions that he lobbed lovingly at President Bush recently. Oh well, can't have everything.

The debates have turned into little more than televised courtroom drama packed down into 90 minutes. Think about it. Scott Peterson's case has been going on for a few months now and various talking-head shows (Greta on Fox News, Dan Abrams on MSNBC, et at.) cover it incesantly every single day, picking apart the events of the day that are interesting and bringing pundtis on who are essentially pitching their own personal verdicts based on sound bites. Replace Peterson Trial with (Vice)Presidential Debates and you basically have the same thing. We could almost skip over the debate itself and just have every single instance broken down and analyzed by heavily-opinionated pundits that use each bite to renforce a talking point.

Howard Stern... Bill O'Reilly was on his show a while back and claimed that Howard paved the way for him and others like him, then proceeded on his own show to disparage Howard for the content of the radio show. This is becoming the norm, of course, and a much more visible version of the same has been easily visible this week since Howard announced his Sirius Satellite Radio transition.

That is, if we take something that is rather easily-observable like Howard's announcement and watch each news outlet report on it in their own, nuanced way, we can begin to see the agendas of these outlets. No, Howard's news is not earth-shattering (unless you were planning on syndicating his show on terrestrial radio past Jan 1, 2006), but as Howard picks away at the various sound bites about his own announcement as it is covered on tv, cable, and print media, it becomes clear that basing your opinion about anything on opinion presented by one or two or even three "respected" news outlets does not guarantee a complete or even accurate representation of events.

Thus, the coverage of the debates for those who don't see the entire presentation, along with the fact-checking afterward, are subject to tremendous variation, nuance, and outright propaganda. Be it a debate, a trial, events in Iraq, coverage of the campaigns, Howard Stern or even something that happens in your own neighborhood, it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy the stuff I see, hear, and read.

What combination of news sources can be used to derive some reasonably-true represenation of what's really going on?