In Memoriam Laura Webster
Catharine McMahon Gardner
Below I list some links that I think might be of interest to progressives who are as dismayed as I am with the mainstream media's exclusion of progressive perspectives from their news coverage.
If progressives remain passive, the main perspective we get is the one that is unrelentingly transmitted into our homes by a mainstream media that, being corporate-owned, is increasingly bottom-line-driven; and the attitude of, e.g., General Electric toward the airwaves is the same as its attitude toward the environment that it exploits and pollutes: GE and the other corporate owners of the mainstream media believe they own the airwaves...and, to a remarkable extent, they, for all practical purposes, do. The inevitable result is a news tinted (and tainted) with a right/centrist, pro-business ideology that is foisted upon us by decision-makers who are quite content to leave unquestioned the unspoken and dubious assumptions upon which their judgments about what qualifies as news—and what is the most accurate way to present that news—are based. After all, a perspective that caters to and reflects the interests of the wealthy is more likely to generate advertising income than a perspective that questions—or, Heaven forfend!, attacks—those beliefs and prejudices. And corporations' very reason for existing is no more or less than to generate profit for their owners.
The above being, as Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman have convincingly shown, the model upon which the mainstream media is built, it is quite natural and even predictable that progressive and left perspectives would be excluded from such a process.
Thus, although fewer than 30% of households owned at least $2,000 of stock and approximately 75% of all stock owned by individuals, including stock held in defined-contribution pension plans, is held by households with incomes of over $100,000 per year, a rising stock market is the only indicator needed to prove that the economy is not merely healthy, but "booming"—this even during times when many willing workers are being "downsized", having their pay and benefits cut, and are so deeply in debt that they may never get their heads above water. The measure of a healthy economy is by definition the stock market because the people who matter to the mainstream media are heavily invested in the stock market. Those for whom the stock market is largely irrelevant simply don't matter.
Similarly, all major networks (including "leftist" PBS) have business news programs, as well as business segments and business correspondents on their regular news programs; the major daily newspapers also emphasize covering the economy from a business perspective almost exclusively. Few, if any, of these news outlets have regular coverage of any kind of labor issues, issues that affect most people directly since most people are neither owners of nor shareholders in a business.
The examples above are only a small sample of what cannot be found in the mainstream. Progressive viewpoints won't come to you unbidden the way right/centrist views do. But they can be found with a little digging.
Bernard Baran, falsely convicted of child molestation during the daycare center witch-hunts of the 1980s, could use your help. Many of those who were falsely convicted of child molestation in the '80s and spent years in prison have been vindicated and released. Bernard has not; he is not wealthy, and he is gay, so few care. (His conviction was secured largely because of the prosecutor's overt appeal to anti-homosexual prejudice.) Bernard is innocent and has been suffering in prison for 15 years because of his refusal to admit to and express remorse for a crime he did not commit. Learn the full story here.
Matt, Sue and Caelin ("Hollywood") Hoye, too (Not affiliated in any way with the Kissinger Mass-Murderer page)