I've been cutting down on the amount media I listen to, read and watch for a while now. I read the cheapest local daily paper in town (the Albuquerque Tribune, where I once worked), but a lot of the time, I've read the national stories by the time I read the paper. Most of my national news comes from plastic.com, which posts links to stories from many different sources. During my day at work, I read a few stories from plastic.com, and I'm just as informed as if I read a big city national paper. Sometimes the Trib doesn't tell me anything new, which is a little disappointing. But it's cheap, and I get sports as well.

I also get to read the Boondocks. Sometime earlier this year I started reading a daily comic strip again. I read the Sunday version of Doonesbury, but usually not the daily version. Boondocks is pretty funny most of the time. This week's topic was trying to figure out what kind of man Condi Rice needs--because clearly she's not getting enough sexual healing. It was promptly banned for a week from the Washington Post.

In the last few years, the Boondocks is probably the most banned or censored comic strip around. Something about a couple of black kids talking frank about national politics and black society in general that seems to get people uptight.

The Prez has decided the national media (who wait for his every utterance in a section of the White House everyday) is biased and filters out the good news from Iraq, only to say bad things (like, y'know, American soldiers are still dying almost every day). So he's going to regional and local (not HIS local, which would be Washington, but smaller towns) newspapers to get the word to the people. He wants to get around the filter by putting in place a filter of his own.

Some geniuses in the military decided it was a good idea to write one uniform letter from all of the American soldiers in Iraq, get a bunch of different soldiers to sign it and then send it out to local papers. They were sent out as if they were unique perspectives from lots of different soldiers. The problem, of course, is that many papers got more than one of these letters and the ruse was up rather quickly. Is this the filter the Prez is talking about?

I don't dwell on the TV news channels too much. I watch a couple of Sunday morning politico talk shows most weekends ("Meet The Press" in particular), but that's about it. I don't watch Fox News. I don't stay on CNN for more than a minute or so. They do bigger stories on the Matrix Reloaded coming out on DVD than they do on actual news. At least, this is what I see during my very selected viewing.

I read Newsweek, but usually stay away from the big cover story. Rush Limbaugh is on the cover this week. It seems the painkiller story was true (I mostly dismissed it as National Enquirer-type stuff), and now he's the poster boy of rehab. I work with people who are medicated every second of their work day. But since it's all prescribed and there are some medical reasons for it, this is perfectly fine. However, there is no smoking, no drinking, and no fooling around at our office. Hypocrisy, of course, is everywhere.

I don't watch prime time TV either. "The Simpsons" and the occasional "60 Minutes" are all I can claim during the magic hours. All of the TV shows I used to watch have gone to TV heaven (DVD box sets, mostly) and so I watch sports and movies instead. It does make understanding people kind of hard when they start talking about whatever reality show is hot or what happened on last night's "O.C." The thing that makes me feel better is the guilty pleasure most people have for knowing this stuff--they feel bad for watching these shows. I feel bad enough about other things, who needs TV-watching guilt?

So really, the filter of news and media is us. Individually, we make our decision about what to watch and pay attention to. The Prez can just talk to people in the heartland if he wants. We'll get a few reports of his jabber if we want to--or we'll pay attention to other things. When he's got something really important to say, he'll have to find a way to get it out to all of us. Until then, I've got my own filter hat on. Do you have yours yet?

Matt Worley has set his filter at "Only A Little Bit Of Bullshit."