“As a journalist, I find it quite strange that there’s not more criticism of the Bush administration in the American media,” said Jon Dennis, deputy news editor Guardian Unlimited. “It’s as though the whole U.S. is in shock (from Sept. 11). It’s hard for (the media) to be dispassionate about it. It seems as though they’re not thinking as clearly as they should be.” This is a far more charitable view than that held by political dissident Noam Chomsky, author of Manufacturing Consent (part of which is reprinted here), who has long believed that the U.S. media is manipulated and controlled by goverment and corporations “so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news ‘objectively’ and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.”
But now, with so many international news sources available on the internet, whose news stories are automatically retrieved, categorized and presented in Google News, it soon may not matter if the U.S. media is controlled or not. Sure, the overseas news sources may still be corporate-controlled with their own agenda, but at least they offer different viewpoints, if not guaranteed objective ones. And let’s not forget the many completely independent news sources. Indymedia, for instance, is “a collection of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth.”
Unlike much of the American press, said Jon Dennis, the Guardian site presents both pro- and anti-war positions and encourages its readers to debate the issues, through the site’s talk boards and interactive features like live interviews with various experts. The only debate in the U.S. media is on the Web, Dennis said. “Weblogs are doing all the work that the U.S. media did in the past,” he said. “That’s an interesting development.”
Indeed, weblogs (or “blogs”) are fast becoming the forum for public debate, just like “the Nets” predicted by Orson Scott Card in his 1985 Hugo award-winning novel Ender’s Game. Google, who boasts the web’s most popular search engine, created quite a stir recently when they purchased San Francisco startup Pyra Labs, which runs the biggest network of Weblogs. Pyra’s Blogger.com has more than 1 million members and 200,000 active blogs. In a recent Associated Press article (found here on CNN), Chris Cleveland of Dieselpoint, a Chicago maker of search software that recently worked with Blogger.com, says that the way bloggers link and influence each other’s thinking could lead to a collective thought process, “a kind of hive brain.” Cleveland believes blogs can turn the concept into reality with the help of Google’s sifting skills.
So will the myriad of international news sources and forums available on the internet raise awareness of opposing viewpoints, promote critical thinking, encourage the debate of political issues and make propaganda easy to detect? That would be nice.