THERE WAS A time when I was convinced that the most powerful person in America was the guy (and I knew it had to be a guy) in Chicago (and I knew it had to be in Chicago) who chooses the Nielsen families, the ones who get the boxes on their TVs that lead to the Nielsen ratings. Think about it: this person decides (with all sorts of evil designs on global domination) who will judge the commercial success of American television shows. He controls our popular culture.

And you know what? I've never met a Nielsen family. People like me don't get those boxes.

See what I mean?

I was explaining this a while ago to an old friend whose profession is politics, and we both knew I was a little bit nutty, so he laughed – but not for very long.

"You know," he said in all seriousness, "there really are small groups of men sitting in back rooms making really important decisions that you'll never know anything about. And I know because I've been in those rooms."

His point, of course, was that I might be paranoid and crazy – but that didn't mean everything going on in this country was exactly on the up and up, just the way the government said it was supposed to be. My Nielsen family plot might be lunacy (although I'm not ready to give it up yet), but the news media are, indeed, controlled by a tiny number of people who make all sorts of horrifying decisions for the worst possible reasons, and They don't tell the rest of us anything about it.

Bruce B. Brugmann likes to talk about the day, back in 1966, early on in the Bay Guardian's history, when a guy came into the print shop on Natoma where the tiny paper had a desk and started talking about the Grassy Knoll. No surprise: we've always attracted people who don't trust the official version of events.

And as Steven T. Jones reports on page 18, the folks who are pushing alternative theories of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, have some ideas that are, well, a little hard to reconcile with available facts. But check out the official Bush administration position: it's a conspiracy theory too – and it's also badly lacking in factual authority. Who are you going to believe?

Tim Redmond