Lexi: I imagine your wife is one great lady. I suspect she's got great taste.

Yeah? She picked me, didn't she? She has all the good luck & I have all the bad luck. As I say, she won me & I won her. ;-) She is. :-)

Actually I was talking about her yard clothes, going out is another matter & she's always out. She has never worn makeup either, so she still looks very good for her age. I've got a sister that's dresses to the nines, false boobs & clogs her face with Quilpie Doll makeup. (Latte Set) She looks terrible & she's 10 years younger than me.

Lexi: if the citizens are denied access to the information they need to make these choices, or if they are given false or misleading
Information, the democratic process becomes a sham.

That exactly why it is a Sham. That's why we need people like Asange & Snowden. Politicians on all side continually feed the people with crap that suits their own agenda. I understand you're still young & if you are still naive enough to believe everything they say or even half what they say I can't help you. Papers are like Lawyers, they are in the business of making money. They'll do anything to create a headline that'll sell papers. The world goes around because of all the Spin.

Someone said, "Stop the World. I want to get off." Well I did. I don't believe any off them any more.

Old saying, Believe none of what you read & only half of what you see. Check it out yourself from independent sources.

Dear Jayb,

Thanks for that - and I'm glad that you don't
disapprove of Independent media sources.
Eventually, the truth does come out.

Lexi,

With the disappearance of broadsheet papers, everything is now in the "tabloid" format, including the SMH, the age etc, so the use of the term Tabloid is a redundancy.

The biggest differences between the mainstream media and the fringe blogs are:

The MSM report the news and do investigations. The Blogs almost exclusively produce what can be loosely described as fact free opinion pieces. That is no way for an intelligent adult to behave.

The MSM employ independent fact checkers for every article, and require more than one source for information before publishing. While because of the short time, the very occasional error slips through, The Blogs have no checking process, and are hugely error prone.

The MSM has codes of conduct to which they are held, again the Blogs have none.

All the MSM papers have articles from a broad spectrum of political views, the Blogs such as NM and IA are of one very narrow political stripe.

I do read the blogs, and do find the odd nugget of interest, I prefer not to take the word of say a retired social science teacher on nuclear energy, or any other of the no bodies that frequent these blogs. Obviously you don't value your integrity so highly.

lexi - Here is a link regarding Rupert Murdoch and his control, he is loosing million on them on his newspapers but the power it gives him is enormous.

http://theconversation.com/murdoch-and-his-influence-on-australian-political-life-16752

SM: The MSM report the news and do investigations.

While I do agree with you on this point they really do spin a story towards a certain Bias that will sell papers, or have a story to negate it on the same page. E.g. They will have a good story about a lone father bringing up 4 young girls as a headline. Then two stories on the same page will be about men mistreating their children & another about a rapist in a park. Another will be in Large bold type, ""1% of aged drivers are a menace on the road" Call for all aged drivers to be tested." What about the 99% of good aged drivers?

So you see the media does manipulate (spin) facts to sell papers & create false impressions.

SM,

New Matilda actually has contributing authors who
are experts in their fields and who always cite
their references and do their research. People
along the likes of Barrister Julian Burnside,
Middle-East expert and well-known author,
Antony Loewenstein,
to name just two from a long list. And comments from
a wide variety of readers are both encouraged and
published. However, as I stated to you in the past -
we have covered this ground many times.
Each of us will continue to connect our dots in
our own way.

Dear Philip S.,

Thanks for the link.
It's much appreciated.

Dear Jayb,

Thank You.

Many of the authors that I read in alternative media -
have all been (and many still are)
contributors to this Forum. I'm sure that Graham Young
would not lend his support to anyone he considered
unreputable. As I've stated in the past - the MSM
in this country is notoriously narrow, expressing the
same (often strident) predictable views.
We need to have a variety of
sources - in order to make informed choices.