So there was Miss California and wannabe Miss USA (except she doesn't like gay marriage), blaming the LIBERAL media for all the lies and slander and backlash against her. Of course, she was hocking a book on Larry King, so I'm not sure why you bite the hand that feeds. She ending up walking off the show because nosey Larry was asking about an out-of-court settlement she made. Oooooo, that lousy LIBERAL media.

This morning, I was reading in the paper about The Sarah Palin book coming out, and the phrase the ELITE media was bantered about. Apparently, they are talking about the very well-to-do media as opposed to the guerilla media that swoops in from the mountains with sneak attack questions. I've often thought about hobnobbing with the ELITE media, but they're so damn stuffy about things.

Basically, everyone has there own adjective for the media these days. I asked my fiancee if she thought the media was liberal, and she said yes. I asked her what she thought liberal meant. She said liberal meant that they were open to lots of different opinions and ideas. For some reason, this definition seemed wrong, so I looked it up: Not narrow in opinion or judgment; tolerant; not orthodox. Her definition was actually correct. I was surprised.

But that's not how I see the media. Liberal? Tolerant? Not orthodox? These days, the media appears to have whatever slant or bias that the network or newspaper or radio program wants. If you want some president bashing fuel, there's a media for you. If you want social injustice and grass roots empowerment stories, there's a media for you. If you want thirty second murder announcements with weather and sports, there's a media for you.

I don't know when the media became liberal, and I really don't know when liberal became a dirty word. What's wrong with being tolerant and not narrow in opinion or judgment?

And then there is the ELITE media. Let's consult the dictionary again: 1) the choice part or superior group and 2) a typewriter type providing 12 characters to the inch. I'm assuming they mean the first one.

I don't know which media is considered superior. I'm sure there are news organizations that think they are superior (NY Times & Wall Street Journal), but let's face it, I wouldn't put it past any news group to slant or outright make up the news when it suits their purposes. Yep, there's even proof of it. Whatever media is considered ELITE, it's probably in their own minds, and of course, the people they attack.

I gave up on the media as being something meaningful during the build up to the Iraq War in 2002. The president basically took existing information to fabricate reasons to attack a preexisting enemy. It's true, look it up. Mistakes were made, and we still went to war against two countries when no actual country attacked us.

If there was ever a chance for a modern Woodward and Bernstein to uncover the truth, that was it. And yet it never happened. By the time the media said "Hey, wait a second," troops had been deployed. WMDs? Portable weapons semi trucks? An empty vial that could contain something? A little research by any media group would have uncovered some flimsy intelligence. Funny, I knew something fishy was going on at the time, and I had absolutely no media credentials at all.

So why do I hear people complaining about the LIBERAL and ELITE media? Because they have their own slanted media. There is no liberal media. There is no elite media. Whatever sells papers, whatever keeps you glue to the screen, whatever you download the most, that's what the media will focus on.

My local newspaper has focused on a punch that the university football coach may or may not have thrown at his assistant coach for two months. Let it go. DWI hit and run by a lawyer? That's a couple months worth of front pages. TV? Please, it has sunk to the depths of talk radio. As sad as it is, children are abducted, abused, and killed every day in a nation of 300 million. Do we all need to obsess over them? Amber Alert! Amber Alert! The Internet? I couldn't tell you what is real, and what is a scam to get my social security number. It's also where this column gets posted, so that should tell you something. Remember, it's not a blog, it's a column!

I don't know what adjective to call the media these days, so I won't. It's still just the media to me. I still read the newspaper (unlike most Americans), I'll peruse about fifteen minutes of national TV news on occasion, and I'll download odd interviews on Larry King if it doesn't take too long. I don't think it's ELITE or LIBERAL. It's just stuff that happens, and that's how the information is disseminated to us. Just like the good folks in Oceania. And really, we shouldn't blame the media when we use them to get attention for ourselves.

Chris Jungle is ready to write his memoirs as soon as anybody cares.