Why, oh why, can't we have a better news media?

Actually, the answer is easy: corporate ownership. That's why the news media's coverage of the Madison protests is so biased. It's why reporters overplayed the tiny presence of the Tea Partiers, wrongly blamed government workers for Wisconsin's budget deficit and neglected to report that the Tea Party is funded by the billionaire-welfare-queen Koch brothers, that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is a Koch whore and that Walker pretty much faked the budget crisis.

Here's an example of the vile stuff we're getting from The New York Post in a piece picked up from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel entitled "Unions lose image war":

The protesters have not won the image war with their Capitol campout. The fleeing Democratic senators have come off as either as shutting down democracy or, worse, buffoons. Hundreds of thousands of parents, whatever their sympathies, have had to scramble for days as teachers’ sick-out shut down schools.

Incredibly, author Patrick McIlheran quotes a teacher who supports the unions as evidence that they've lost the image war. No wonder his critics call McIlheran "comically inept."

But here's what you need to know about the New York Post (and Fox News, for that matter): It's owned by Rupert Murdoch, a reactionary billionaire who donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. The RGA contributed $5 million to Walker's political campaign.

The mainstream media has fallen on hard times in the past decade, losing readership, viewership and advertising revenue. And they can't understand why.