One of my favorite real-life anecdotes: (I’ve witnessed this numerous times over the years):

C-SPAN CALLER: “I want to talk about X, because it’s never been covered by the media.”

C-SPAN HOST: “How did you learn about this?”

C-SPAN CALLER: “I heard it on the radio.”

What the caller is unconsciously saying is that it’s not being reported in the mainstream media.*

Fortunately, the days are long gone when three networks, the NYT, WaPo, and AP pretty controlled everything being reported. But today thanks to everything from the web to Twitter, there’s virtually nothing that goes unreported.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have to dig for it sometimes, but Google makes that easy, especially if you know a little about structuring search parameters.

And if you bookmark about half a dozen websites, a conservative can get all the less-reported information he could want. Or he can enjoy Fox news or talk radio. It’s no coincidence that these broadcast resources have overwhelming ratings. They are the antidote to the MSM.

But you don’t even need a computer or television. The Wall Street Journal is now the nation’s largest daily, which I have delivered to me each morning instead of the local rag.

It’s “straight news” reporting is scrupulously unbiased, and its editorial page —which is conservative— provides a refreshing alternative to the knee-jerk liberalism of most of the nation’s newspapers.

More important, the WSJ is big and profitable enough to have a very large news staff. This is in stark contrast to the average daily newspaper which simply regurgitates AP and NYT stories for its national reporting.

The UPI is effectively gone,** and Reuters is rarely used as a news feed in this country, even though it’s offensively liberal.

The real tragedy of journalism is that US newspapers are folding at record rates. Almost all afternoon papers (historically “the working man’s paper” in every city) have disappeared. And only a handful of cities have more than one paper, period.

Unfortunately, this means that through attrition, The New York Times essentially drives all American newspaper coverage. Newspaper and network editors look at what the NYT is covering and follow it like trained monkeys.

NYT stories —and more important, its slant on the news— get passed through with no scrutiny or editing. When I was in journalism school, at least AP stories were typically rewritten by the local pubs.

Such concentration of orientation would be bad under any circumstances, but it's especially dangerous since the Times management has passed on to one of the idiot children, “Pinch” Sulzberger.

Many of us can exult in the Times’ slide towards bankruptcy, but know that won’t help. The execrable Minneapolis Star & Tribune (referred to locally as the Star & Sickle or Red Star) is hemorrhaging money, but even as it lays off staff by the carload, the most brain-dead liberals within the publication cling like lamprey eels.

Notwithstanding all the above, “never been reported in the media” is the unicorn of modern communications: a wholly mythical creature whose attraction borders on the mystical.

And one of the perverse results of this myth is that it creates endless bogus “never been reported” emails, which pretend to be some sort of magical truth unavailable anywhere else.

Refer to my upcoming post “Top Ten ways to spot hoaxes, urban legends, and bogus emails."

* Often abbreviated as MSM. Or as ex-CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg wryly describes it, the lamestream media. It is so heavily biased nowadyas as to be something of a joke, if it weren’t a disservice to the American public.

** Its share plummeted with the disappearance of afternoon newspapers, its primary niche. It was finally sold by the founding Scripps family, with two subsequent bankruptcies. Now owned by the Unification Church.