you seem to believe that there are no state secrets and that everything there is to know about a situation is laid bare before the public.  In your world our agents gather their information and turn around and share that with the media.

No, I don't believe that at all. I think there are boatloads of secrets and anyone who has made a reasonable attempt to look at the Bush administration and how they operate knows they are probably the most secretive administration in our history. As an example, the Patriot Act, I don't really think all the "media hype" about that being put in place to violate our civil rights is what that's all about. I think it's about secrets and keeping more of them and being able to control our judicial system in ways they could not have before. So no, that's not at all how I see things. I make no judgments of the "secret information" and I have no idea what intelligence agents are gathering as I type this. None of that plays into how I look at things at all really, because I don't know about it. So I don't take any of that into account.

 Of course I don't believe that intel people gather their info and turn right around and share it with the media...I think you could fairly call me insane if I said that. I do however think that journalists uncover quite a bit of important information and I think a lot of things are just general well known facts. They may be facts you or I are not aware of until somebody writes about them but they are facts just the same. Where I think things get really strange is when people try to avoid what is a simple fact or an administration official does all they can to avoid that fact, spin it, or point us in a different direction away from it. That's when the media most needs to do their job because they are our conduit to the facts. Administration officials lie on a regular basis. I don't just mean Bush administration officials, I mean all of them. If Kerry is elected officials from his administration will lie to us as well...it is what's done...period. To a great extent the media's job is to catch them in those lies. The Bush administration's lies have been gigantic and they come in waves. They keep getting caught in them as well. So, a rather large point, I think, is that we know the administration will lie to us, so we must view them in the harshest light possible...we need to count on the media to expose those lies...quickly and in an accurate manner.

So, it's far more likely the media will tell us the truth than the sitting administration will. In a time like this where partisan cat fighting is at its peak the job of the media becomes even more important. I do agree that the media gets caught up in that partisan cat fighting in a big way at times and they play right into it. I'm still a fairly young guy, I think, but I gotta say I've never seen any administration attack the media in the way the Bush administration has. Part of their focus seems to be to destroy all faith we have in the media. It's not so difficult to see why they would want to do this, if we stop believing anything we see or hear the media report then they can go about their business without any sort of accountability. This is really why the media is so important to our way of life...they have the power to report the facts and hold these politicians accountable to you and me.

So when you say:

 I don't know what the answer is but I do know that a good dose of skepticism is a healthy antidote to much of the hype we're exposed to in the media because remember...hype sells and good news doesn't. 

I agree with that but I think it's fairly easy to identify "hype" from fact. Hype is stories about the National Guard, mentioning someones lesbian daughter, or swift boat veterans that are trying to rewrite history. The hype is obvious in those stories. Simple and well known facts, like say that Afghanistan is the world's largest opium producer, are not hype. The fact that our government is selling bombs to Israel is not hype. The fact that Mr. Allawi is one of the people who provided this administration with loads of false information in the build up to war is not hype. That he was a Bathist is not hype. That he once worked for Saddam is not hype. That he spent 30 years in London lining his own pockets, getting all cuddly with the Saudis and lying to our CIA and MI-6 is not hype. That bit you wrote about him "spending a quarter of a century trying to overthrow Saddam" is sheer fairy tale. That's something that the Bush administration would put out as part of a press kit to promote the guy. A kit that would also say stuff like "he loves kittens, children, and long walks on the beach. He's a wonderful grandfather and the best friend the United States and the Iraqi people ever had."...that's hype. It's not real hard to see the difference.

Does all that seem reasonable to you?