Walter Cronkite once said "Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened." Sadly, that isn't what passes for the news media does today. The mainstream media is more interested in picking winners than reporting on outcomes. They've gone from "...and that's the way it is" to "..and that's the way we want you think it is" with virtually every story colored by opinion, punditry and spin. Shaping public opinion and government policy, instead of reporting and questioning them are the orders of the day.

The media has three main tools at their disposal: what to report, how much emphasis to give, and how to spin the information.

Spin is the most obvious and over-used. Reporters who sneer and talk down to interviewees, from the person at a protest to a Presidential candidate. It was easy to see whom the press favors and who they despise.

What to report and what not to report are more insidious, because they are behind the scenes and you don't get to see it. They're frequently tied in to how much emphasis to give a particular story.

For example, look no further than the 9/12 Tea Party protest march on Washington. The media coverage from MSNBC and CNN to blogs like the Huffington Post, while covering the event, lowballed attendance and trivialized coverage, when it wasn't replaced with outright ad hominem attacks on attendees. On the other side, we have the over-inflated estimates of 1.5+ million attendees. Who are you going to believe? The Washington D.C. mass transit authority said ridership numbers were 235,000 higher than normal that weekend. Was there a secret Jonas Brothers concert that weekend in D.C.? Or is the truth somewhere in between, and the real story that whether you agree with their position or not, enough people showed up to signify there is a large number of citizens unhappy with the way things are going?

After all, just imagine how the MSM would have reported an event of the size of the 9/12 Washington, D.C. Tea Party Protest if George W. Bush was still in office and they were protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.