A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that more than half of Americans say United States news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on.

With the United States military fighting a protracted war in Iraq and a wide-open presidential campaign already making headlines daily, Americans of all ages are interested in current affairs and are consuming news like never before, right? Wrong, according to a recent report from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

The fragmentation of media and consumers' increasing control over their media consumption is causing marketers to shift dollars away from traditional media like TV, print and radio towards 'new media.' According to McKinsey, by 2010, TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.

Recently, equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS) published its annual "Communications Industry Forecast" and once again cited public relations as one of the fastest-growing (media) segments in the United States. VSS reports that PR's annual compound growth rate from 2001-2006 was 8.3 percent; advertising, by comparison, grew at a 4.5 percent rate during the same period. Communications spending will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in 2008 and reach $1.222 trillion in 2011, according to the VSS Forecast.