I vaguely remember seeing Hillary talking about how many countries Barack HAD NOT visited, compared to her. When this passport thing came up, I really wondered if it was her camp that was behind it. I mean, what if she said all that, and Barack said, "Yes, I did visit blah, blah, blah,"

Turns out she & McCain had their stuff looked at too, but Obama's is far more recent, and they all correspond either to a primary, or a major speech.

Still don't know what to think, but I do think that the media is feeding the fiction that she can catch up. The only way she can win it is to steal it, IMNSHO.

What better way to take the media off YOUR trail, then to have been a victim TOO.

The political skills of the Clintons were apparently transferred from Bill to Hillary by the press, much like his governing experience was. Why Hillary's claims of experience and electability were never challenged is one of the most frustrating things about this primary campaign. These alleged strengths, which were a complete fabrication fed to and reported by the press, has been the only thing that has kept her viable since her 20-point loss in Wisconsin.

The Clinton campaign set out to control the narrative, and the press meekly obliged, suggesting that their inability to expose the misdeeds of the Bush adminstration, or even to report them accurately, is more an institutional failure than traditional bias. The media will simply report what it is told, and do no further reporting absent catastrophic failure of policy or viable political opposition.

Unfortunately for Hillary, her claims of competence and experience were so vastly inflated, and so easily debunked once the press finally smelled the blood in the water, that her train wreck of a candidacy should remove the aura of inevitability that still hovers around her campaign.

I find the MSM an increasingly unreliable source of objective news.

Especially investigative journalism. (Credit to those few MSM journalists who actually ask questions before going to print.) It's been the norm to automatically print a white house press release, a pentagon press release or a pre-written AP story and not even think twice about it. But these un-vetted pre-spun stories are now more obviously out of step with the facts.

So who are the modern day investigative journalists? People like Glenn Greenwald, without whom the telecom immunity issue would have never reached the public. With the help of bloggers pitching in more insight and collecting links to the facts, or info that contradicts those facts, wherever they are on the internet.

Granted, it's not easy wading through tons of propaganda, uninformed posts, and brain-cell deficit comments and all the other distractions. But after a while, you can see those coming from a mile away.

I suggested a few months ago that MSM newspapers and national news broadcasts have lost a good percentage of their audience because they are no longer the only outlets for distributing information. More importantly, those who have had the power to control the information flow for have had quite a sobering 8 years. And they don't like it one bit.

(Keep an eye on decisions made by the FCC that favor larger conglomerates, thus causing more and more independent stations in cities across America to go off the air. Newscorp continues to buy up an even larger portfolio of media real estate. It was recently reported that they made a bid for Yahoo, but that's not verified. Net neutrality is as important an issue as
telecom immunity.)

Back to the slow fade of MSM.

Anyone who oversees the advertising budget of a Fortune 500 company knows that their budgets for TV commercials have been reduced and those for the internet have dramatically increased.

There are already people who got rid of their televisions and now use their computers and large plasma displays for watching their favorite programs without commercial interruption, and essentially create their own programming preferences, not those the networks or cable companies choose for you.

Sorry for the long post, little bit of a rant there.

Keep the information flowing.

Somebody get the fork ready.

That lying monster is done!

Bionic Soy, She might be done, but she's not done making trouble.

Ironically, perhaps because I don't live inside the US media bubble, I've found MSM reporting to be both more honest and more balanced than anything I've found on a blog. I read TPM for the muck and for the quick news updates, I read the comments because I'm a graduate student and need something that's not my thesis for distraction.

In this campaign in particular I've found most blog sources to be so wholly in the pocket of one campaign or the other that their election coverage is unreadable. I give the example of Matt Yglesias--my go to source for the last few years--who I can't read anymore because his blind man-crush on BHO is so irritating and ruins his ability to report on the campaign in a way readable to anyone but (A) BHO supporters (B) blind HRC fanatics who want a fight.

It's the same here - all the clinton and obama talking points espoused by readers and supporters in the forums cannot substitute for a few ounces of simple, clear, comparitive, analytical commentary from a well-funded, well-trained major news source (TV doesn't count - TV news is the tabloid of the MSM world).

Get off your high horses blogosphere. You're here for a reason and we appreciate it, but replacing honest-to-god investigative journalists whose only agenda is figuring things out not advancing a political/moral/ideological position is not one of them.

I'm beginning to think the superdelegates should hold off and tip the scale in June, when the popular vote is tallied nationally, including Puerto Rico.

You're right, the left leaning blogosphere is very partisan with the Clinton-Obama wars and for the record I'm not a partisan of either side. I read the MSM for it's more objective approach to news and events and articles written by real journalists. Do they miss stories and fail to thoroughly investigate others, they sure do and the blogs will continue to point out their shortcomings.

To Andrew's question, yes the nominating process is effectively over. The longer it is dragged out the longer John McCain can travel around the world unchallenged like it's a pre-coronation event. And he has more time to incorporate Bush campaign staff into his own team. Bush may have done in his own legacy but the Republican Party is not dead.