One of the biggest stories right now is that the MSM habitually fails to report on really big stories. That's why James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles' ACORN videos are so striking--they reveal a pattern of systemic bias, incompetence, and reportorial failure on the part of the journalists and news organizations that we trust to tell us what's happening in the world. Inconvenient stories are swept under the rug, or, if they can't be completely ignored, they are warped and distorted by bad faith reporting. That's why the Van Jones scandal didn't get reported until he had resigned. That's why the media never did vet Barack Obama while it hunted Sarah Palin as though she were the anti-Christ. And it tells us a lot about why the very real, nonpartisan grassroots movement that sprung up this summer--the one where people from all walks of life and all political bents oppose government expansion, excessive spending, and mammoth entitlement programs that will no doubt be run as badly and wastefully as existing mammoth entitlement programs--has been reported dismissively, as a staged, hysterical, right-wing fringe thing that should be ignored or even suppressed. That's way wrong -- but you can't get your news from mainstream sources and know that. The game is just about up, though. Just ask Jon Stewart.

One reason the MSM can get away with so much is that too many Americans are walking around dazed and confused about what it means to be American. They wouldn't know a civics lesson if it smacked them in the face. They can't name the branches of government, or tell you who is on the Supreme Court, or even name the first president. It's nice to see CNN's Lou Dobbs point that out. Change we can believe in can't happen without informed citizens.