DC Sniper

It's different in not being merely "sensationalist" media, but I suppose that's a personal judgment.

I'm not sure why exactly you're bringing in politicians into this, but I will make a comment on college being a superior source of information. In regards to certain sciences and technical subjects, universities are certainly one of the best sources of information. Social sciences, I'm sure you'll agree, are quite different, depending on the professor and the information that is chosen to represent the subject. How that professor guides you through that subject can vary wildly among disciplines, depending on how their views were formed in the first place. While you can say that educators have a different overall purpose from politicians, you can't say they have completely different agendas of persuasion for their subject.

New Yorker is snotty and elitist. I tried to get into it, but it has stuff like "modern poetry," which is really bad most of the time because it tries to be pretentious more than it tries to make pretty sentences out of words. If you look up "The Good Morrow" by John Donne, or some of Emily Dickinson's works, and compare those to the modern poetry in the New Yorker, you will see the difference. Pretentious =/= deep and beautiful.

I might add that I spoke of the New Yorker with my former English professor, with whom I've been friends for the past 10 years, (30 years experience, BA from Yale, PhD from University of Chicago,) and he AGREED COMPLETELY. My impression of New Yorker is even lower than of stuff like CNN, because CNN at least speaks on the level of hte general public, where the New Yorker is "too good" for them.

As for college, yes, professor quality varies. I have gone to a $hitty school, a mediocre school, and a great school, and the only difference is that $hitty schools have more bad professors than the mediocre and great ones. Most professors even in $hitty schools are extremely intelligent and qualified, but as a person who's considered the PhD route, I can tell you that the job market has too many PhDs, so many great people end up in crappy schools.

So, you'll sometimes have a crappy professor, but you can SEE he's crap. One of my profs in the great school made us read EVERYTHING HE'S EVER WRITTEN. I, at a BA level, write much better than him with his PhD, and in any case, making people in your class read your own stuff is pathetic. I never took anything from his class seriously. Another prof (in the $hitty school) assigned such horrible books that they were almost unreadable, and gave such dull lectures that I learned nothing listening to her for 3 hours at a time; she was rude and condescending. Most professors know their stuff. You sit there and listen to them for a few hours, and you see them using examples, and give interesting lectures, and you KNOW they're the real thing. I cannot really think of a professor I've ever taken who was engaging and a good lecturer, who assigned good books, but who didn't teach me anything.