Yesterday The Los Angeles Times had an article on school not starting up until September 13th and paragraphs further down the page supposedly enumerating the cuts in transportation and what schools and programs would be affected or eliminated.

They got it wrong. Some of my neighbors whose children attend those schools were quite upset. I encouraged them to call the phone number on their transportation letter to get the straight story.

I know for sure the "information" in the news article was misleading and in some instances just plain wrong.

The only other time where I have had first-hand knowledge of media malfeasance was when the Berkeley Free Speech Movement hit the headlines. The stories all said how the people who had blockaded the police car and staged the movement were all drugged-out hippies and they featured prominently a picture of a scruffy spacey hippie who had just wandered up, "Whassup, dude?" He wasn't one of us.

The people on the ground around the car were students. I was one of them, knew many of them personally. We were just ordinary students, standing up (or in this case sitting down) for what we believed was right--freedom of speech on campus. Not a joint was passed, not an Alice B. Toklas brownie in sight. We were all studying for exams, many of us in graduate school.

That was my first experience of deliberate media distortion, verified by my own first-hand personal knowledge. I've wondered since then just how much of our news is manufactured out of half-truths or out of whole cloth.

And how many of those half-truths and lies, repeated often and loudly enough, become accepted as valid.