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THANK YOU so much for this WONDERFUL post. I have thought EXACTLY the same thing for many MANY years.

The McMartin case was one of the prime events that made me forever suspicious of the agenda-driven media, who want to discredit private enterprise, weaken the American family, destroy privacy and promote ever greater -- and tighter -- STATE CONTROL of domestic affairs.

As I said in an earlier post:

VENGEANCE belongs to God. WE ought to be more in the business of binding up wounds and healing the broken lives of those often fatally damaged by the fallout from a crime. The innocent husbands, wives and CHILDREN of perpetrators ought not to be left to suffer cruelly for the crime of someone on whom they were dependent.

Our priorities are all wrong.

Speaking as someone whose entire adult life has been spent in public communications, I wish with all my heart that the general public would come to understand just how mendacious and double-dealing the news media can be.

Even when they report what is called hard news — just the facts of where, what, when, how, who — they get details wrong more frequently than people realize. Yet hard news is considerably more reliable that soft news, which is all the filler, background, polls, and opinion stuff. Particularly on TV news (both cable and the national and local broadcasts), content consists of perhaps 5% hard news and 95% filler.

Yet most people consume the filler uncritically, as though it were factual, when the bulk of it is agenda-driven opinion and spin. Hidden agendas do not always have to be political, by the way. The overriding agenda of all purveyors of news product, whether print or broadcast, is to beat the competition and make money. In today's heavily niche-oriented market, some skew Left, some skew Right, some skew toward low-brow gossip, others toward high-brow "information," and so on.

Purveyors of news product are no different from purveyors of other types of product, except in one crucial way. They are the filter through which the general public is informed (well or poorly; mostly poorly) of public policy issues. It is largely the broadcast news media that:

Has framed politics as a kind of sport,
Props up our so-called "two-party" system, even though political parties are private entities having nothing to do with government except insofar as they sponsor candidates for public office,
Actively backs political agendas rather than remaining strictly neutral, although they promote themselves as "objective,"
Decides what is and is not newsworthy,
Actively lies, misrepresents, withholds critical facts, and otherwise misleads the public when it suits the media's purposes.

This is why, whenever I have the opportunity, I caution people to be highly skeptical of ANYTHING in the news other than hard facts. Make your own judgments based on multiple corroborative sources of information. And even then, give a story time to unfold fully before jumping to the conclusion the media seems intent on making you draw.