The amount of time you have to watch, and commercial ads you absorb, for just a hint of truth does not serve to enlighten but to leave you further in the dark about all subjects but the new line of SUV's or the latest anti-depression drugs that poisoned lab rats but should give you a lift so high you won't care about hair-loss or a limp-dick.

We're left caught up in an illusive web strung by headline news and Sunday morning pundits & preachers of semantic debates never addressing the root of the problem, confining you to think in their terms of alternatives which successfully avoid any credible solutions.

Where to turn? Non-commercialized print media - books not strategically arranged at the front door of Borders.

In contrast to what one would believe considering a Big Media business model. Like any other business they have a product to sell and need consumers to sell it to. If you were to ask anyone what they believed to be the product of a newspaper, they would tell you it was the paper itself, the news stories within and all that, and they would tell you the consumer/ market, is the subscribers or those caffiene-jonsin' twitches at Starbucks that buy their daily news as they get their morning fix. It's a simple model and a stupid question.

Actually the product in the Media biz is those latte junky-beanheads and the market/consumer is the advertisers. As Noam Chomsky explains, " the economic structure of a newspaper is that it sells readers to other businesses. See they're not really trying to sell newspapers to people - in fact, very often, a journal that's in financial trouble will try and cut down it's circulation, and what they'll try and do is up-scale their readership, because that increases their advertising rates."

Noam Chomsky? Who listens to that old fuck, I've never seen him on FOX or "Good Morning America". If he really had anything worth listening to he'd be doing Verizon commercials.

"We're not in the business of providing news and information, we're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products." Clear Channel ceo Lowry Mays in a Fortune magazine interview.

Obviously credible information, an education of the events effecting our lives is not a priority within the industry that, people have come to believe, serves that function. Newspapers use their marketing department in the editing of their news content, so as not to offend their advertisers.

One could argue - their in the business to make money, and that's how money is made with advertising dollars. On one level that's perfectly logical, after all the bottom line is god in this market driven society. The problem comes in when these companies misrepresent themselves and their "mission statement" as legitimate sources of credible unbiased information.

As products on grocery store shelves are labeled with information listing how much of the content is substantial and how much empty caloric crap. If you traced most of the stories published by the corporate media on t.v., cable, radio, print and internet - and who has time for that - you would find your mind has been feeding on a high calorie saturated fat, processed sugar diet, with little to no substantial ingredients to be found.

And the illusion runs so deep that many reading this content or other articles similar to it will instantly, and with confidence, quickly dismiss it without further investigation or further thought because they've never heard it on 60 minutes. It must be radical far-left nonsense because it's not being reported in the "liberal media".

Big Media does such a sorry job of informing subscribers and viewers that there is an organization - Project Censored, Media Democracy in Action - whose sole purpose is to publish censored or underreported stories, putting out books full of articles that cover the preceding year.

Some of the stories covered by Project Censored in their Censored 2003;

>FCC Moves To Privatize Airwaves - this story was reported from April - October of 2001 in The Guardian, MediaFile (twice in 2001), and Mother Jones. And in June of 2003 Michael Powell and the FCC laxed ownership rules for Big Media allowing further consolidation and control of our airwaves. Polling showed 70% of the american public were ignorant of the impending decision.

>New Trade Treaty Seeks to Privatize Global Social Services.
>U.S. Policies in Columbia Support Mass Murder.
>Bush Admin. Hampered FBI Investigation
into Bin Laden Family Before 9-11
>U.S. Intentionally destroyed Iraq’s Water System –
This was during the first Gulf War, the United States deliberately Bombed Iraq’s water system. After the war the U.S. pushed sanctions to prevent importation of necessary supplies for water purification.
These actions resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi Civilians many of whom were young children.

>Corporations Promote HMO Model for School Districts.
>NAFTA’s Chapter 11 Overrides Public Protection Laws of Countries.
>New Laws Restrict Access to Abortions in U.S.
>Bush’s Energy Plan Threatens Environment and Public Health - well, this one's a given - a perfect example of the underreporting of even the obvious.

And of course the #1 Project Censored awarded Greg Palast story concerning the 2000 elections published in England while the ballots were still being counted. If that info had been published at that time in this country I strongly doubt Bush would be sitting in the white house today. The rest of the world saw our elections were no better than in some third world bannana republic.

These all too important stories were either not reported or underreported in America, although most is second-hand knowledge in the rest of the world.

Of course you know months ahead of time of the new Matrix movie and feel like you're in the loop and you know that you can go to burger king and get the new disney movie action figures with a kids pack but have you heard of the release of the documentary "Afghan Massacre - Convoy of Death", concerning the war in Afghanistan that offers proof of war crimes the U.S. appear to be involved in so cruel they rival the thrills of Klause Barbie, evidence so incriminating persons were literally killed while collecting. People put their lives on the line to make this movie and their lives are still in danger - have you heard about it, there'll be no happy-meal action figures, no t-shirts, no coca-cola can advertisement, no red-carpet celebrity-studded "Sneak Preview". You got to look for this one. After a rough cut of the film was screened before the European Parliament last year, it became the subject of articles and commentaries in virtually every major newspaper in Europe, prompting demands by human rights organizations and lawyers for an official investigation. In the US, however, the film has been subjected to a near-total blackout by the media and unremitting hostility from the Bush administration, which unsuccessfully pressured the German government to stop its broadcast in that country.

If you believe that there are segments of the world population that are bent to destroy our way of life because "they're jealous of the freedoms we enjoy in this country" you need to turn off your televisions - hell you already know who J-Lo is going to marry, and trust, if she gets a divorce you'll receive that info through osmosis.

Read - seek knowledge, don't wait for some talking head to read to you what is written by virtually unknown and/or corrupted sources. Read from all sources then decide.

The power of books was recognized way back in the 1700's by Voltaire who wrote - "You despise books, you whose life is devoted to the vanities of ambition and the search for pleasure, or plunged in idleness; but you should realize that the whole of the known world, with the exception of the savage races, is governed by books alone."

T. V. is not a governing force but a controlling element.

Be vigilant in your quest for knowledge - the con is on and you're the mark - in the words of Aliester Crowley - "Doubt. Doubt thyself. Doubt even if thou doubt est thyself. Doubt all. Doubt even if thou doubt est all."

A bit of overkill but you get the point. The mission of this magazine is to search for credible sources and then share that information with those that wish to learn.