In case the news doesn’t depress you enough, here are some tales guaranteed to take the curl out of your hair. I did pretty well: I’d heard of at least 20 of these, but they haven’t appeared anywhere enough in the mass media. And I’m quite sure Fox News hasn’t carried one of them.
I actually wrote a long entry on media bias. One of the few things I didn’t add to it was my personal view on the whole matter: The media is biased, but it’s not stupid.
The right complains about how stories are presented. The left complains about stories being left out, usually when the story’s just a bunch of hot air. Non-leftie hot-air stories get full coverage, though, so the media can dissect the crap out of them and justify themselves as a public service (The Bell Curve, for example). They can’t present leftie hot-air stories without inviting immediate dissection from the right, and they don’t want to be doing the dissecting themselves. Therefore, stories about the supposedly impending Draft (legislation sponsored by Democrats, shot down in the House) and the supposed growing wealth gap (nonexistent once you factor out immigrants) are just left out so they can fester in non-legitimate channels.
That’s my theory, anyway.