Todd Stadler's blog

I've been noticing a number of issues similar to this one. The disheartening thing though is that many issues like this seem to get brushed under the carpet or swiftly ushered out of the limelight 'till the American Public forget about it. It has been making me increasingly suspicious of our media as well as our government.

When our president claims that we have to demonstrate a "need to know" in order to release documents from his father's presidency to the American public, issues with Enron have been covered up and very strange and fishy things that have been happening with the environment ("Clear Skies" indeed!) - it makes my skin crawl. But I don't hear the outrage that I would expect from our media. The silence is eerie - like a jungle forest that contains a large predator.

It made me want to figure out what is really going on out there. I commend Todd in looking up so many news sources. I've been on my own private crusade to find sources that are decent and provide me with good information. In addition to finding many international news sources which I found interesting (There's something to be said for knowing what other countries think of what we're doing), I found some sites to organizations I've heard of - but didn't realize they maintained online versions. For those of you who already know of these - I apologize. But I felt it was worthwhile to mention them.

1) FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). "The national media watch group, (that) has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986."

http://www.fair.org/


2) The Daily Howler: Bob Somerby actively searches for disinformation in our news sources and prints his objections to them here in an often funny but frank portrayal of what is wrong with our media.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/archives.shtml


3) Project Censored:
They publish a book of the top unreported or under-reported stories each year.

http://www.projectcensored.org/


Of these sites - the first two are ones I've read through enough to have a good idea that they are not guilty of much bias themselves. They seem to go after both liberal and conservative blunders alike. I'm not as familiar with Project Censored - but it looks well worth the read.

The FAIR site offers a nice listing of alternative news sources:

http://www.fair.org/resources.html


Here is another list I found on a University of Chicago site:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/news/altnews.html


Happy reading!

PS - I apologize that I don't have my links cleverly tied in with hypertext. I simply am not that familiar with such things and decided not to embarrass myself trying. So I hope you forgive me for including the actual web address instead.

That's odd. When I looked up the comment on preview - it was fine. But when I looked at it later, it looks like there are pieces missing. It usually clears up after I hit refresh - but I hope other people aren't having problems even reading it. It would be weird and a bit ironic for a comment that lists sites that are against censorship be partially mangled or erased by some digital blip.

Is this some kind of strange omen?

I hope it's just a problem the university computers have over here...