For the past couple of weeks or so I've realized that the majority of the up to the minute news I'm getting, is not in fact coming from the newspapers or the TV stations. But instead are coming to me through friends who themselves are willing to testify that their sources are beyond accurate, and are actually super accurate. Of course I may just be getting critical and/or impatient here but its certainly disturbing to me that for some reason or another the news outlets have not been one day or a few hours behind... but closer to 3-5 days behind the news I am receiving. And these are really important news items... things that become front page news the whenever it is published, which has lead to me wonder. Is it that our news outlets, are withholding the news?

I have to ask this question because, quite frankly it is becoming disturbing. Another thing that is important to add is, the accuracy of the "word of mouth" news has increased to the point where I no longer take these pieces of information with a massive level of skepticism and disbelief, but now believe them almost word for word to be true. Am I to believe that the news outlets no longer have the same sources for news that they did before, the same sources that found out things like how much the new BOJ governor was paid are now failing or late?

The news items in question that I am talking about in fact have all occurred since the start of the year. So things such as the entire Fiasco with the Don; The revocation of the visa's of Wayne Chen and other business men; The revocation of the visa's of artists Bounty Killer, Beenie Man and Movado; The fact that the US had suspected 3 high placed government officials of doing illicit business.... All of these things I had heard about days before it was reported by any of the media outlets. The last article regarding the government officials I actually saw on the Associated Press' website about 2 days before the TVJ or CVM news even caught wind of it.

To be fair to the news outlets (or... at least being somewhat fair), maybe the proper argument should be have the news outlets simply gotten outdated? I mean all of the news items I have spoken about so far I got either through messages from friends on my blackberry, or through twitter or through the internet. Maybe its just that the news outlets are not able to transmit the news as quickly... Well normally I would agree with and see the merit in this argument, but that would be forgetting the fact that as I stated before, it wasn't just a day (For the newspapers) or a few hours (for the TV news), its multiple days.

Which leads me to ask the question that is foremost in my mind, is the press being slow because they are trying to protect somebody? and Who are they trying to protect? Yes most people will state that alot of the news media are severly partisan, but even then I would assume that these outlets would still need to make money, and to make money the most effective way (and I'm just throwing this out there), would be to do their jobs and report the actual news. After all how much can these people really be paying to protect themselves in the news, when the fact remains that the news is going to get out eventually? So you see the whole notion of protecting whosoever really does nothing at all but make you seem like a horrible news reporter.

If you aren't going to report the news properly, then please stop calling yourselves news carriers.