Ah, yes. Another day of excitement and light here on the farm in the heart of Oakland.

Well, yes. What could it be otherwise?

This is something I posted as a letter in response to one of Glenn Greenwald's recent posts on Salon.com (which didn't really follow the subject, but, for some reason, caused me to write):

This is a little (non-sectarian) prayer for the MSM (Main Stream Media) over the holidays. My news sources consist of subscriptions to The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The Nation, Harpers, The New Yorker and Mother Jones of which I assume the first two, at least, would be considered MSM. From this you can guess I'm in my sixties, since younger folks don't mess with print anymore. I have become addicted (well, close to addicted) to Mr. Greenwald's column as an old ACLU'er (note the use of "column" and not "blog", another indication I'm over the hill), the Huffington Post and clicking on Google News more often than a sane man should. There are online others I read as often as not which most of you know "as the usual suspects".

I would suggest that my addition of the blogs to my print mix has given me a critical look from a different direction at my own long ingrained MSM reading habits and this I'm finding extremely useful. Joe Klein, for example, I remember from his Rolling Stone days and would normally give him a pass without particularly thinking had I not read about his latest FISA columns in Time magazine here. I stopped reading Time itself decades ago, but now, I'm afraid, I may need to re-read Klein's Bob Dylan book to see if he was similarly damaged back when he was writing for Rolling Stone.

One of the questions often peripherally addressed here is where will an average American get his or her news from a broad range of hopefully insightful perspectives in the future, some of which are free of the narrow biases that have always existed in the MSM? Radical thought, I know, but hope springs eternal during the holidays. We've certainly not had it in the past. In watching people such as Robert Murdoch absorb the WSJ and the FCC charging toward further media consolidation, well, is there really any hope for the future?

I'd say some. Some hope. Yes I'm more of a techie than most at my age, having earned my living in computers, but I'm seeing a new world open with the Internet. I'm scared to death by most of the Republicans I've seen in office since Eisenhower (odd over the years to find yourself remembering Eisenhower more and more fondly) and, although I'm certainly more comfortable today with the Democrats, I'm still just as upset as we all are over their lack of courage.

So the point of this? More sources of analytical reporting, please, I guess from the web as it doesn't seem to be coming from television or print. More venues with critical thinking and less name calling. The Republicans aren't going away, neither are the Democrats, but I'm guessing (hoping, fantasizing, living in denial) that this web business will give us more information in making decisions, allow candidates to run for office both nationally and locally, who would otherwise never be noticed, and provide the MSM of the future with the fact checking they so richly require. Keep writing, but more critically, please, less of the shouting, if not for your benefit, then for mine.