In Rupert Murdoch's world of media, most of it is entertainment designed to attract viewers and advertising revenue. That's what drives it.

Unfortunately very few people in America value truth and learning about difficult and hard to comprehend topics. True, there still are old fashioned investigative reporters, that produce good work but there seems to be little interest from the general public in their work. What they want, and get, in the way of "news" is pre-processed sixty second sound bites. That's why Fox News has an audience.

There is anecdotal evidence for the dumbing down of Americans as well, but whether this is a result of rotten media or rotten education is unclear. The result is the same, Britney commands more attention then the design of a global greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme.

As for the French satire, as satire goes, it's funny. The reality though is that the situation of the French and Hitler's evil were written large enough to make it perfectly obvious to anyone alive at the time that there was going to be collateral damage.

When someone does write the history of the American media during the Iraq war, it's going to be a tale of complicity in carefully spreading the Bush Administrations orchestrated litany of lies regarding weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the war in the first place. Mere gullibility doesn't explain it.

I have about forty web pages that I browse for news, and I normally check the history of the reporters themselves if a particularly sensational report appears. The last one I checked was Daniel Foggo, whose piece today about Iran purchasing African monkeys is now being morphed into an Iranian bio - weapons campaign. For the record, Foggo appears to be a trustworthy source and I think one can safely assume that Iran purchases monkeys. All else is speculation.