Condolences to those few directly affected by Anna Nicole Smith’s sudden demise.

Still, while CNN and FOX go into 24/7 wall-to-wall dead Playmate mode, here are a few other things they could be talking about today:

So you can see why Anna Nicole’s death is getting all the coverage. Slow news day.

Incidentally, you’re looking at a montage of the front pages of CBS News, ABC News, MSNBC, CNN, and FOX News, at 7 pm est. Every single goddam network.

To review: news shows are, yes, shows. They do not make money by providing us useful information. They make money by providing us… to the advertisers.

And according to the Google News "Most Popular" section, we care a great deal about dead Playmates, stalker astronauts in diapers, Ryan O’ Neal getting arrested, and Britney Spears not being a lesbian.

So that’s what we get.

When we can’t find Iran on a map but we’re willing to kill Iranians — and then we wonder why the world doesn’t exactly run the way we figured — it’s not CNN’s fault.

It’s ours.

A Colin Newell Post
As Bob will tell you, Canada (next to Australia… and perhaps Trinidad & Tobago) is the greatest nation on the planet. We bristle with pride as we describe the free health-care and post-secondary education (Free education!? No, wait – that is Ireland!) On top of all of this, Canadians, Bob might muse, are overarchingly polite. We live in a land of press freedom, socialism-lite and an enduring love for all things Canadian and eschew garish behavior and any sudden movements that might draw more than a micro-second of unwanted attention to ourselves.

Reality check: We are a nation of people whose media is controlled by a small handful of families. Fact is, the media is way more open in the United States of America. North of 49, media families control all the newspapers (radio and TV) and a handful of galaxy sized telcos, which control telephone and the internet.

Between the U.S. and Canada, the internet, at least for the time being… is about equal in terms of its accessibility.  But for how long?

Our own Tory (your Republican) government (currently in a very shaky minority government) is entertaining the notion of allowing large Telcos to decide which parts of the internet info-pie are good for us.

"Documents obtained by The Canadian Press indicate that senior advisers to Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, who has previously declared a "consumer first" approach, are carefully heeding the arguments of large telecommunications companies like Videotron and Telus against so-called Net neutrality legislation." – link

In all fairness, this discussion is not so much about what you can access but when and how you can access it. The proverbial It being blogs, great and small, and all manner of corporate sites, e-commerce, governmental and non-governmental agencies…

In a worse case scenario (unlikely as this is Canada after all), the Internet (from a Canadian perspective) could be more like a really bad cable channel (as viewed from, say, North Bay, Ontario…)

Unlikely though. America had this discussion ages ago. And flushed it.

And so should we.

A Colin Newell Post
As Bob will tell you, Canada (next to Australia… and perhaps Trinidad & Tobago) is the greatest nation on the planet. We bristle with pride as we describe the free health-care and post-secondary education (Free education!? No, wait – that is Ireland!) On top of all of this, Canadians, Bob might muse, are overarchingly polite. We live in a land of press freedom, socialism-lite and an enduring love for all things Canadian and eschew garish behavior and any sudden movements that might draw more than a micro-second of unwanted attention to ourselves.

Reality check: We are a nation of people whose media is controlled by a small handful of families. Fact is, the media is way more open in the United States of America. North of 49, media families control all the newspapers (radio and TV) and a handful of galaxy sized telcos, which control telephone and the internet.

Between the U.S. and Canada, the internet, at least for the time being… is about equal in terms of its accessibility.  But for how long?

Our own Tory (your Republican) government (currently in a very shaky minority government) is entertaining the notion of allowing large Telcos to decide which parts of the internet info-pie are good for us.

"Documents obtained by The Canadian Press indicate that senior advisers to Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, who has previously declared a "consumer first" approach, are carefully heeding the arguments of large telecommunications companies like Videotron and Telus against so-called Net neutrality legislation." – link

In all fairness, this discussion is not so much about what you can access but when and how you can access it. The proverbial It being blogs, great and small, and all manner of corporate sites, e-commerce, governmental and non-governmental agencies…

In a worse case scenario (unlikely as this is Canada after all), the Internet (from a Canadian perspective) could be more like a really bad cable channel (as viewed from, say, North Bay, Ontario…)

Unlikely though. America had this discussion ages ago. And flushed it.

And so should we.

A Colin Newell Post
As Bob will tell you, Canada (next to Australia… and perhaps Trinidad & Tobago) is the greatest nation on the planet. We bristle with pride as we describe the free health-care and post-secondary education (Free education!? No, wait – that is Ireland!) On top of all of this, Canadians, Bob might muse, are overarchingly polite. We live in a land of press freedom, socialism-lite and an enduring love for all things Canadian and eschew garish behavior and any sudden movements that might draw more than a micro-second of unwanted attention to ourselves.

Reality check: We are a nation of people whose media is controlled by a small handful of families. Fact is, the media is way more open in the United States of America. North of 49, media families control all the newspapers (radio and TV) and a handful of galaxy sized telcos, which control telephone and the internet.

Between the U.S. and Canada, the internet, at least for the time being… is about equal in terms of its accessibility.  But for how long?

Our own Tory (your Republican) government (currently in a very shaky minority government) is entertaining the notion of allowing large Telcos to decide which parts of the internet info-pie are good for us.

"Documents obtained by The Canadian Press indicate that senior advisers to Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, who has previously declared a "consumer first" approach, are carefully heeding the arguments of large telecommunications companies like Videotron and Telus against so-called Net neutrality legislation." – link

In all fairness, this discussion is not so much about what you can access but when and how you can access it. The proverbial It being blogs, great and small, and all manner of corporate sites, e-commerce, governmental and non-governmental agencies…

In a worse case scenario (unlikely as this is Canada after all), the Internet (from a Canadian perspective) could be more like a really bad cable channel (as viewed from, say, North Bay, Ontario…)

Unlikely though. America had this discussion ages ago. And flushed it.

And so should we.

One last thought (I hope) about the Boston "bomb hoax" — amazingly, that completely incorrect phrase is still being used in some major media headlines, despite the well-established fact that nothing of the kind ever happened.

The phrase occurs in this case not because it’s related to reality, but simply because authority figures used it. And now it continues on, lingering, refusing to die despite its uselessness in describing the event.

Consider: this is what happens when local officials briefly utter complete nonsense about a single, simple and local issue that is immediately debunked. The horseshit still takes weeks to filter out.

Now consider the case when powerful national officials repeatedly utter half-truths about multiple, complex, faraway concerns that are later debunked. Are there enough filters in the world to clean out that crap? Possibly not.

And then, years later, the reality-based community wonders why millions of Americans still don’t understand either basic stuff like Iraq’s lack of connection to 9-11.  We wonder how Bush can get away with blurring Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda in the recent State of the Union address.  But maybe it’s no wonder at all.

The Mooninite incident is kinda scary to think about. But not because of any blinking lights in Boston.