So, I’m watching the Superbowl with a friend. During halftime, I almost fell over dead when Janet Jackson decided to expose her breast on stage. (Justin Timberlake tore off a removable piece of clothing, which revealed an open breast with nothing but a little pasty over her nipple.) That goes by and a little later another friend walks through the door. “Janet Jackson showed her breast during halftime,” I told him. He offered that in exchange for doing the dishes that I would try to find the image online.

This was at most one half hour after it happened. I figured it was pretty quick to have a new picture of Janet up on the internet but there had to be some website out there dedicated to it. It is, afterall, Janet with part of her breast exposed. I looked and looked. Superbowl.com had recent pictures of the halftime show, but no picture of Janet’s exposed breast. Finally I asked myself, “What site would have up-to-the-minute, latebreaking, racy, gossipy news?”

Ladies and gentleman, I found it. The only site that had this latebreaking story within, literally minutes: The Drudge Report.

This inspired me to discuss something that is distinctly absent from our culture: investigative reporting.

“News” is supposed to be just that: new. Those in the industry should pride themselves on one thing: getting the story before everyone else does. What do our current newspapers pride themselves on? Propaganda.

Although not mainstream, the newspaper at Penn State University, The Collegian, was a complete and total liberal rag-mag, good for nothing except maybe as toilet paper. But even then it’s probably a little scratchy. Not only did they promote every single liberal/socialist agenda, everything the University wanted to push, they endorsed. The University can raise tuition by percentages well over the inflation rate, and instead of doing any kind of investigative work on university waste spending; those at the Collegian boast “The university really needed the extra money!” My one friend put it best: if the Collegian had as much brains as it had tits, we’d have a dynamic paper.

What do the national papers promote? The Washington Post reported about a recent new phenomenon. On corrupt politicians or any kind of latebreaking story? Nah, they did a story entirely on how young women, below the age of consent, are making out with other women. Just about every story from the New York Times paints the US or the US military as corrupt, oppressive tyrants. These newspapers serve one purpose: to spread propaganda.

What happened to newsies, the young boys shouting on the street corners about latebreaking stories? With the internet here, this sort of latebreaking information should happen all the time.

I want to see people who care, who get the cutting edge information, who challenge the system, who tell me something new that no one else know yet before anyone else does.

Instead we get more and more propaganda. The news no longer serves to compliment our eyes and ears by informing us of events around the world that we cannot see for ourselves. It now serves as a means of thought control, blurring and omitting reality, re-creating it for their purposes.

It doesn’t much matter if they are liberal or conservative either. Conservatives just as easily fall to publishing the status quo, although, in an ironic twist, the only latebreaking news sources anymore are “conservative.”

I look forward to the day when news is in fact new.