Border Battle and What to Believe

I have a Google Alert for Nuevo Laredo. I get everything that pops up about the city including blogs. These alerts make you think that there is a constant gun battle going on in Nuevo Laredo because every incident is written about and blogged about over and over and over even days after it happened. I could just stop the Alert but we have to drive through Nuevo Laredo if we drive back to Texas and I want to know what is happening there.

Recently the Nuevo Laredo alerts lit up with the news that two ranches near Laredo had been taken over by the Zetas but the news sources were blogs and on-line publications. Supposedly the government was keeping this invasion of the United States of America quiet. But can the government keep FOX and CNN from sniffing around at any story that might help fill up their 24/7 need for news. When Anderson Cooper didn't show up on some South Texas road within about six hours with a bullet proof vest to interview the ranch owners who had been kicked off their land, I figured that it was a hoax.

No one in any government jurisdiction would confirm the invasion of the Zetas but that did not stop the Cypress Times, a christian, conservative on-line publication, from continuing to send out reports. Several days after this Zeta take over was refuted, they still ran a story about it but they at least by that time were saying that they could not confirm the story but their eye-witness reporter was still standing by what he wrote....and they published the whole thing again.

I have gotten better at censoring the alerts. If it is from the Cypress Times, I'm probably not going to read it. Sometimes things are repeated over and over and over. Did these four bodies just show up or are they the same four bodies that were reported on five days ago. I'll read a border blog a time or two but if I get a sense that they are very biased, I'll stop reading them. I don't twitter but I understand that the twitters on the border situation have become a gumbo mix of truths, lies and exaggerations, so that would not be a reliable way to know what is happening.

The Mexican newspapers and TV stations can not be relied on because the cartels have managed to terrorize the Mexican media especially along the border so that it seems that they can dictate the news that gets published. The loss of a free press anywhere in Mexico is a terrible threat to Mexico's democracy.

Some of the sources that I'm following are:
The Laredo and San Antonio news reports about Nuevo Laredo
On Facebook: Nuevo Laredo Tamaulipas
Blog:  I really don't have one to recommend. News and rumors get blogged and reblogged so many times that I can't sort out fact from fiction. I do read Que Fregados from Laredo. She writes mostly about Laredo but at times when she recounts hearing guns and explosions from across the river, the post is thoughtful.
Yahoo Groups: The Civil List here in San Miguel. People often report about their drive to and from Texas. Most say that they had no problems but often enough to be worrisome someone will report problems. In the past is was about being stopped for a "traffic violation" but recently it is taking a bit uglier turn...being stopped by eight "policemen" and a knife planted in the car so that the mordita became a much larger sum. Being chased at high speed by a strangely marked police car. And reports outside the Civil List of car hijackings.
United States Travel Warnings - especial when they are a local report from Nuevo Laredo or Monterrey.

The situation in Nuevo Laredo and all along the border is terrible. You don't know what is really happening because the news is censored, muddled and many times biased toward different political agendas on both sides of the border. Do you have a news source or blog that you trust?