News...what News?

Is it just me that feels that the soul purpose of the news media is to dumb down the people of this country, or what? I'm not just talking the stuff on television, but the print media as well. I know I am not the first person to complain about this stuff, so I will attempt to not,... turn this into some incessant banter, but here goes. We have news casts that are supposedly thirty minutes long. In this news cast their is approximately eighteen minutes of stuff that isn't commercials. Take out the Sports....which isn't news... it's entertainment. Take out the entertainment section because, well.... it's the same as Sports. So now we are down to roughly ten minutes of stuff to talk about. They spend another three to five minutes doing crap like, try it before you buy it, or their investigating report on someone on the city counsel that parked in front of a parking meter that was broken so they wouldn't have to pay! This passes for news? Throw in the other everyday stuff about a house fire, a car wreck, and Paris Hilton doing a photo shoot in Atlanta. That gives you three minutes to talk about the war, politics on the hill, the financial debacle that the nation is in, and a ten second sound bite of the president,.... in where ever he is for the day!
The print media is not any better. The sensational stuff makes the headlines. The rest of the real news gets a paragraph on pg. 12 buried between the Lipitor add, and the Spring white sale at Wal-mart. When as a culture we don't read, and our kid's don't read, and pop culture makes the "news" as the way that we define ourselves in some sort of ego extension. When critical thinking skills become less important than the shoes that we wear, or the car that we drive, or neighborhood that we live in. That to me is the real news! That is why everyone has an opinion on Iraq, but no one can find it on the map. Most people couldn't tell you weather Saddam was a Shite, or a Sunni. It feels that the only place that you can get an accurate report on the news is on your local PBS. station or the BBC. It is definitely the only place where you can listen to two sides, with opposing views, actually talk for more than two minutes on a particular subject without some interruption informing me of some other late breaking news. Like congress investigating baseball and steroid use. It's the entertainment industry. They get paid for putting butts in seats for money. Who cares! When Sit-coms become funny, and reality TV becomes real, and the lobbyist in D.C. have used up all of their multinational petroleum industry's money buying seats in congress, and the White house. Give me a call. That will be news!