So my roommate and I are trying to watch MSNBC in order to procrastinate doing our work, but it's some special program and not repetitive political news, so we switched to CNN, and it's that YouTube video "Charlie Bit Me." I don't know if anyone's seen it, but I personally don't even think it's that good. Anyway, it's just this guy talking about what a phenomenon this video is, and then they showed a bunch of imitation videos (one of which was definitely not even in English), and a "Charlie Bit Me" tshirt line, and how these kids' father made them Facebook accounts to handle all their "fans," and it's just like, seriously? This is what we're spending our time on?

I get that not everyone cares about global issues, and just the other night I told Maggie that if we didn't go out for her pre-birthday, I would probably just go home and watch online episodes of "Brothers and Sisters" (I like to pretend that Rob Lowe's character is just an extension of when he was on "The West Wing."), but "Charlie Bit Me?"

well i'm glad you decided to pre-birthday!  the question is how do we get everyone to care about global issues, or even start to think that maybe they should

Well, in this case, somehow disconnecting mainstream media from its business entanglements and the need to make a profit would be a start, but even beyond that (which I don't know how to do) is the fact that a segment on the most popular YouTube vidoes is what makes money. It's kind of a chicken and egg thing, I think, because, as Cecil said in the panel, they only bring the oil here because we buy it (they only play those things because we tune in), but if we're not provided with alternatives, what else are we (we being the general American public, of course) going to do? Not everyone has time to seek out reliable online news sources or even to read the New York Times.