The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

After nearly a lifetime of being a newspaper junkie, I'm close to finally kicking the habit.  I recently canceled our daily subscription to the Chicago Tribune.  At the last minute, my determination to go cold turkey faltered and I'll be tapering off by reading the Sunday edition for a while longer.

No fancy rehab. No expensive detox for my newsprint addiction.  Just me and my willpower.

Two weeks into my self-administered therapy, I'm holding up OK. I suspect it won't be long before I call the Trib again, get a perky telephone voice on the other end and tell her the bad news, "Cancel Sundays also and send me a refund."

She (it's always a she) will feign disappointment, ask me a couple of questions, and then tap away at her computer.

One less newspaper reader. One more nail in the coffin of the newspaper industry. It didn't have to end this way.

I'd given up TV news years ago. The commercials were annoying, but it was actual lack of news that finally drove me away. Local news was the worst , so that was the first to go. Then the network and cable news became intolerable. Too much political and corporate propaganda. Too many celebrities. Too many vapid talking heads. Too few stories about working class issues, the environment, war and peace, race and gender.

At least with the newspaper, one could skip over the bullshit and focus on reading stories with some actual interest. But my partner Estelle and my daughter  Dana starting complaining about the kitchen table littered with reading material that well....never actually got read. My partner hated the corporate propaganda. My daughter hated the waste of trees.

What was I reading anyway? Most of the newspaper is display and classified ads. I had trained myself not to see that clutter. Sports? Real Estate? Autos? More waste.

So most of the newspaper was wasted already.

The rest of the paper? It had become too much like a paper version of TV news. I felt sorry for the good writers at the Trib like Stephen Franklin, Julia Keller, Mary Schmich, Dawn Turner Trice, Michael Wilmington and a few others. Imagine sweating away for that perfect adverbial clause only to be buried in corporate garbage.

Even my favorite Trib comics like Brewster Rockit: Space Guy, Doonsbury, For Better or For Worse, Get Fuzzy, Frazz, and Brenda Starr couldn't make up for the company they were forced to keep.

Now I get my local news from RSS feeds.  I get my favorite comics from GoComics.com and have discovered new ones that were simply unavailable on the pages of the Midwest's "newspaper of record".

As for national and international news? Praise the lord for the Internet which allows me to read a mix of news sources from around the planet. A Newsweek subscription gives me a nice compact weekly digest of USMSM (United States Main Stream Media), suitable for reading on the kitchen table.

At least now I can put more distance between myself  and the mass media monster.

Still, even thinking about kicking the habit was not easy. I had grown up on the Washington Post and the Sunday NY Times. I'd read the Chicago Daily News, the Sun-Times, and the Defender. When traveling, I eagerly snatched up the local papers as part of the "on the road" adventure.

But last night vindicated my decision. My partner Estelle Carol and I went to Women and Children First bookstore to hear Jennifer Pozner and Anne Elizabeth Moore talk about the sexism and just plain dumbfuckism rampant in our mass media. They are both media critics at Women in Media and News (WIMN).

After their presentation had skillfully shredded the pretensions of the mass media, we accompanied Jennifer Pozner, Paula Kamen and a few other genial folks to a local Chicago eatery.

I knew Jennifer Pozner only as a damned good writer. As a person, Jennifer proved to be smart, funny, compassionate, friendly and most important of all--- downright informative. She does her homework and judging by the help she gives to other journalists, she does a lot of their homework as well.

So why is this bright talented young woman living on the edge of poverty begging for grants, while running one of the best media analysis organizations on the web?

Go figure.

In fact that's a good idea. Why don't you visit WIMN and figure out for yourself why the Corporate Media and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex shun her and her associates as if they were carrying some virulent disease.

My decision to cancel the daily Chicago Tribune was just an insignificant act of individual protest. Not even a gnat in the eye of the USMSM.

It sure was nice to spend an evening with someone who takes the battle for media justice to the very gates of the enemy.