At the end of the Salon article linked below, Conason points out that oddly enough no major American newspapers seem to have noticed the little plagiarism problem. Indeed, USA Today, at least, doesn't feature the story in their "News" section. Perhaps more rigorous searching would turn it up - I don't know. But it's really hard for Amercians to go searching for a news story when they don't know it exists, and being as how newspapers are one of the primary vehicles for telling people the news, we seem to have ourselves a little catch 22.

Anyhow, while I was reading the USA Today "News" section, the "This Week's Debates" caught my eye. Having grown up in a pretty conservative household, I was taught that the media has a liberal bias. I'm relieved to have found a popular newspaper that goes against that theory; USA Today doesn't even pretend that they can keep their opinions hidden. They actually list such articles as "Powell Lays Out Convincing Evidence of Iraq's Defiance" and "Deficits Definitely Matter" under "Our View," and the responses to these articles under "Opposing View." Upon about 10 seconds of reflection, I could come up with two or three other ways of naming these sets of opposing views that don't indicate the USA Today's stance on them. Of course newspapers have editorial sections, and of course newspaper writers and owners have political opinions. And I suppose one could argue that the writing in the other articles, the ones not in the opinion (or "debates") section are perfectly unbiased. But the key point here is that it's not bias in the writing that's the most important thing anymore. It's the bias in the decision of what to mention to the public and what to ignore. Because USA Today's conservative readers have the right to ignore the piece on plagiarism for themselves.

Salon.com is certainly liberally biased. I don't even know if the word "biased" is strong enough to communicate how liberal Salon is. Unfortunately for us, this liberally biased news source is the only source I've come across that reports stories that major news networks seem to ignore completely. Stories that seem - to me - rather important. Meanwhile, the TV "news" shows are reporting on Jason Priestly's terrible race car accident and Michael Jackson.

By the way, did anyone catch "Dateline"'s hard-hitting expose on PETA last night?