TV News LIES

There is nothing more sacred to the maintenance of democracy than a free press. Access to comprehensive, accurate and quality information is essential to the manifestation of Socratic citizenship - the society characterized by a civically engaged, well-informed and socially invested populace.

Thus, to the degree that access to quality information is willfully or unintentionally obstructed, democracy itself is degraded. It is ironic that in the era of 24-hour cable news networks and "reality" programming, the news-to-fluff ratio and overall veracity of information has declined precipitously.

Warming air from climate change isn't the only thing that will speed ice melting near the poles - so will the warming water beneath the ice, a new study points out.

Increased melting of ice in Greenland and parts of Antarctica has been reported as a consequence of global warming, potentially raising sea levels. But little attention has been paid to the impact of warmer water beneath the ice.

Hunky actor Jack Scalia, who once played Susan Lucci's love interest on "All My Children," started two patriotic charities -- including a 9/11 nonprofit -- but his role as a philanthropist was just an act. He raised more than $100,000 for military vets and 9/11 victims, yet paid out little -- and now claims he doesn't know what happened to the money.

The IRS just yanked the tax-exempt status from Scalia's 9-11-01 Lest We Forget group because it failed to file a single tax return in its decade of existence. And his Operation American Spirit charity, founded to help wounded vets, was suspended by California authorities because of lapses in paying taxes and fees.

Getting on the wrong side of a political fight can land you in the crosshairs of a White House smear campaign, at least that is what appears to have happened during the Bush administration years. According to recent testimony by former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Glenn Carle, the Bush White House ordered the agency to dig up dirt on a prominent university professor that had been outspoken against the war in Iraq, in order to publicly discredit him -- and that was apparently not the only time the administration targeted those who dared to question the legitimacy of its actions.

While 76 per cent correctly said Great Britain, 19 per cent were unsure, and 5 per cent mentioned another country.

It was young people letting the side down with 67 per cent of those under 30 giving the right country.

This is against 80 per cent of those 60 and older, 77 per cent of those 45 to 59, and 77 per cent of those between 30 and 44.

But a report produced by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability found:

Approximately 18 million cubic feet of radioactive and chemical solid wastes onsite were disposed of since 1943. “All of the radioactive waste and most of the chemical waste have been buried on the mesas of Pajarito Plateau where LANL is located. Radioactive liquid wastes were discharged to the canyons, initially with little treatment.”

This year, the Georgia legislature considered a bill that would require women to prove their miscarriages “occurred naturally” and weren’t secret abortions. In a similar vein, the Guardian reports that states including Mississippi and Alabama are charging dozens of women with murder or other serious crimes who have miscarried or had stillbirths:

Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

Federal prosecutors indicted and then put out an arrest warrant on Dawkins earlier this year while he was working as one of Guantánamo’s most prolific public affairs photographers — capturing intimate images of the captives in the prison camps, celebrities and fellow soldiers.

His alleged offense: He failed to report in a 2006 State Department application for a passport that he had earlier started the process of applying in 2003.