I’m sorry, but if you get all your news from the mainstream media (MSM), you just don’t know what’s happening in the world. Mainstream “news” is shaped by an identifiable hardened mindset that believes everything can be solved by talking; there are no real enemies (except global warming); and that we in the West are the biggest cause of world problems. Try and find a story in your paper outside this formula. I dare you.

Thankfully, the Internet blew up the MSM monopoly – and the competition is deadly. To see the power of the Web, just take a look at the New York Times circulation figures and stock prices: dropping like stones. The young hardly consult newspapers anymore. The Internet, with all its faults, is their primary source thanks to its zero cost, speed, global coverage, multiplicity of voices, and – there’s video clips. Why read the biased, predictable, flat, uninformed Times?

If you haven’t tried it, go to the Web. Anyone interested in Jewish and Israeli issues, for example, has to be reading the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz on line every day, seeing the stories covered from different, often fresh perspectives. Anyone even remotely concerned about the ongoing jihadi war against Jews, Christians and other infidels has to be reading Web sites like Little Green Footballs, Solomonia, Atlas Shrugs and the Jawa Report.

If you get news from the Internet, you’d be able to see how papers like the Times and The Washington Post cover up and marginalize the jihad, “explaining” brutality and murder with “root causes,” i.e. poverty, “occupation” and “humiliation.” You’d look in vain for the latest body count from Thailand, the latest plot uncovered in Italy, or the latest Islamic “charity” group indicted in the U.S. Maybe on page C32, if it is covered at all.

So Americans are turning to the Web for news collated and analyzed by fellow citizen bloggers. The best bloggers write better than the columnists you read, and the video-bloggers are much smarter and more entertaining than the talking heads on CNN, etc. And it’s fun. Try it: go to Little Green Footballs and watch the delicious video clip of Christopher Hitchens devouring the spokesman from CAIR (Committee on American-Islamic Relations). Go to Miss Kelly’s blog and read about Imam Muhammad Masood of Sharon now fighting deportation. Solomonia covers the Boston mosque trial with details you won’t find in the press. You can go to Jihad Watch and learn the daily results of jihadi attacks around the globe. You would likely know none of this from The Boston Globe, the Times, the Post. You’d be ignorant.

The blogosphere is not all good and healthy. There’s the so-called Democratic “net-roots,” centered around Daily Kos, which posts thousands of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic messages. Not to mention all the straightforward anti-Semitism that floods the Web.

But more information is better than less. If you’re not spending time on the Web, you’re blind to the world we inhabit.