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of frisking grandmothers and taking away our toothpaste at the airport is more relevant to our collective psyches than establishing a legitimate security process for the millions of tons of cargo that float into our harbors each day, or having what's left of the National Guard protect our chemical plants.

Even on the most innocuous level, we live in a world that craves a much higher degree of certainty in our lives because uncertainty equates to insecurity a premise that is true for everything from suicide bombers to gingivitis. But the most disturbing byproduct of our recent hunger for certainty is that it has superseded our demand for truth.

Of course, this is not a conscious act. Like the detective who thinks he's found his murderer, our minds will eagerly make the leap from circumstance to certainty simply because the desire for security in times of fear is so powerful. It is not a screaming-in-terror type of fear that I am talking about, but rather a low-level state of discomfort that continuously prods us toward that which will make us feel more secure. And in our day-to-day, let's-go-shopping-while-our-so ldiers-die culture, there is no longer as great a need for any connection between truth and the messages that will fulfill the mental component of security. As long as the information being fed to us is presented as fact, our behavior can be easily manipulated to support the political or economic interests that claim they are either preserving us from harm or warning us of its impending onset.

This brings us to money. There was a time when the news media served us by providing what was essentially the same product: Facts. Our narrow range of pre-internet media sources differentiated themselves based on a small set of rather trivial elements, such as how quickly they could get those facts to us and the gravitas of their anchor men. Add to that constraints such as the anachronistic Fairness Doctrine, and you had a small band of news sources that at least made up for their considerable blandness by giving us a sense of certainty through consensus.

Inevitably, the act of distributing news evolved into a different kind of business. It was a slow process at first, in which the bureaus were somewhat insulated from their newly profit driven leadership within their large conglomerates. In the beginning, there was an understanding that the value proposition of a news organization was its credibility - a so-called sacred trust with its readers, listeners and viewers.

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