The Shield of Ignorance

Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution explains how Americans are protected from information:

For almost a year and a half now American citizens have been in very grave danger. This danger, so frightening that it's difficult even to speak of it, is that we might hear an interview with Jafar Dhia Jafar, the father of the Iraqi nuclear program. If that had happened, we might have definitively learned that Iraq had had no nuclear program since 1991, and that as Jafar puts it, the US and UK governments "were lying to their people... I knew they knew they were lying." Fortunately, the US media has protected us with a high-tech, billion-dollar, satellite-based Shield of Ignorance.
...
But it's only now that we're learning of the closest call of all. It turns out the story CBS bumped for the infamous segment on George Bush's National Guard service actually included an interview with Jafar. But the Shield of Ignorance, working just as it was designed, swung into action at the last moment and saved us from knowing something about life on earth.

There's a third paragraph in the middle, but you'll have to go to A Tiny Revolution to read it.