7:49:20 AM  

In these last days I have noticed a flickering of hope. For the past five years it has seemed that no matter how great our government's crimes, lies, illegal invasion of a country, acts of torture, or willful destruction of the environment, there were virtually no repercussions because these acts were barely reported on the television news, and television news is the primary information source for the majority of people in this country.

I had begun to suspect that we had truly arrived in an Orwellian reality that didn't even involve any great suppression of the press. After all, the information about all of these high crimes has been out there for anyone to see on the Internet, in documentaries, and in many of the newspapers and journals that actually still report the news.

No, all it takes is an ongoing distraction by the corporate-owned television media telling the public what subjects are worthy of news: Terry Schiavo, the Michael Jackson trial, hurricane Dennis. After a lifetime of believing that, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it 'no lie can live forever,' I had come to think that we had crossed the Rubicon into a virtual world where infotainment was the majority reality, controlled by those who profit from the public's ignorance, and that, unlike forced repression, it was too insidious to fight.

But with the recent polls showing that a majority in the U.S. now oppose the war in Iraq and believe there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, and with the scandal erupting around Karl Rove in which David Gregory of NBC and Terry Moran of ABC actually stood up for truth in their grilling of White House spokesman Scott McClellan, I dare to feel once again that maybe it is true: no lie can live forever.