Speaking with grace and ease, a pensive network anchor compared the America of today with the one of a year ago. His script had the ring of media truth at the start of a new season. "How different the summer is going to be for all of us," CNN's Aaron Brown told viewers. A minute later, he added: "Summer life is going on. It's just different. Everything is."

Such assertions have repeated endlessly in media circles. They make sense if dictionaries are now obsolete and words don't really need to mean anything in particular. "Everything" is "different" for "all of us" only when the preposterous can be rendered plausible.

As a practical matter, virtually closed loops often dominate major news outlets. The result is what we could call "monomedia." When similar noises keep filling echo chambers, they tend to drown out other sounds.

July Fourth gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect. This holiday commemorates a revolution that made possible the extraordinarily important First Amendment. These days, in theory, just about everyone in the country has freedom to speak. But freedom to be heard is another matter.

AUSTIN, Texas -- "Jaw, jaw," said Winston Churchill, "is better than war, war."

I bring up the not-often-contested notion that peace is better than war only because it seems the Bush administration is incapable of grasping the self-evident. According to The New York Times, President Bush has directed his top security people -- a happy nest of neo-con hawks -- "to make a doctrine of pre-emptive action against states and terrorist groups trying to develop weapons of mass destruction." This means, we declare war first. This dogma "will be the foundation of a new national security strategy."

Let's see, we already have our military in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Georgia and the Philippines. We are also deeply into Colombia as part of the Drug War and have fairly regular deployment by special ops in Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Good thing for India and Pakistan they made it into the Nuclear Club before the deadline, eh? Let's see, add Iran, North Korea and some of the nuttier princes, kings, sheiks, presidents-for-life -- I make that

If you believe what the Forest Service interrogators say, Terry Lynn Barton started the big fire in Colorado's Pike National Forest by burning a letter from her estranged husband. Maybe so, and possibly the jury will be forgiving when they hear more details of Ms. Barton's married life. But a jury might well be equally forgiving if it turns out Terry Lynn started the fire by setting fire to her pay stub.

After 18 years of dedicated service, Terry Lynn Barton's monthly pay was $1,485, which tots up to $17,820 a year. Try raising two kids on that in the greater metropolitan area of Denver. She's being described in the press as "a Forest Service technician," which is FS-speak for all-purpose manual laborers who clean up campgrounds, trail maintenance and kindred grunt work.

Forget the Edward Abbeys, Jack Kerouacs and Gary Snyders of the forest fire watches, turning out literature while communing with nature and scanning the ridge lines for telltale plumes. The Forest Service, part of the USDA, has long been notorious for exploiting its bottom-rung workers

Thirty years have passed since Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began to cover the Watergate story. The investigative journalism that they did back then still stands out as exceptional. Unfortunately.

For a long time after the arrests of five burglars at the Democratic National Committee's executive offices in the early morning of June 17, 1972, the conventional media wisdom was to accept the White House depiction of a minor crime without any political significance. During that summer and fall, few journalists devoted much time to probing the Watergate incident as President Nixon cruised to a landslide re-election victory in November.

"At the time of Watergate, there were some 2,000 full-time reporters in Washington, working for major news organizations," Bernstein later pointed out. "In the first six months after the break-in ... 14 of those reporters were assigned by their news organizations to cover the Watergate story on a full-time basis, and of these 14, half-a-dozen on what you might call an investigative basis."

Speaking at Harvard's Institute of Politics in 1989, Bernstein

DALLAS -- The world will little note nor long remember what was said at the Republican state convention last weekend. Nevertheless, the shindig had its moments. (I first saw the Lincoln quote applied to some political event in the Boston Globe a while back, but I can no longer remember who wrote it.)

A supremely nostalgic moment occurred during the convention's recognition of Sen. Phil Gramm for Lifetime Achievement. Gramm responded graciously, as befits a retiring pol making his final appearance, thanking all and sundry, giving us his fondest memories of public service: "I had the honor to be a storm trooper in the Reagan Revolution," he declared. But then, he couldn't help himself. The old pit bull dropped the statesman pose and went for the Democrats' jugular. He started in politics as an attack dog and finished that way, too -- in its way, a glorious moment.

Unfortunately, the attack was a trifle off. Gramm appeared to be in a state of high indignation because two Democratic contenders for the gubernatorial nomination had held a debate in Spanish. "Anybody who