George W. Bush's Tuesday night national address reflected "a purposeful strategy based on extensive study of public opinion about how to maintain support for a costly and problem-plagued military mission," the Washington Post's Peter Baker and Dan Balz write. The White House consulted the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F.

"Mainstream media is the term often used to describe the collective group of big TV, radio and newspapers in the United States," Project Censored's Peter Phillips writes. "However, mainstream media no longer produce news for the mainstream population - nor should we consider the media as plural.

The New York Times' Frank Rich warns that Sesame Street's Big Bird is the "ornithological equivalent of a red herring." The right's latest assault on public broadcasting is "far more insidious and ingenious" than that seen under Newt Gingrich a decade ago. "The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers' expense.