A request to all that read and lurk and contribute

I fear that we (the liberal/progressive community) may lose one of the most important sources of information - ConsortiumNews.com

please read and if you have a couple dollars to help them meet their expenses, please consider giving

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/061606.html

Five Days Left

By Robert Parry
June 16, 2006

Some e-mailers and friends have asked why I didn’t attend some of the recent progressive conferences – like “Take Back America” or the “Yearly Kos Convention” – where media was on the agenda. The short answer is that I have been to progressive meetings in the past where media was discussed – and almost nothing gets done.

As the Right has built up a vertically integrated media infrastructure that stretches from newspapers, magazines and books to talk radio, cable news and well-funded Internet sites, wealthy liberals mostly have sat on their hands. Even now, as the Right expands that infrastructure horizontally down to state, district and local levels – with ominous portents for Election 2006 – well-heeled liberals remain mostly passive.

And this pattern has been going on for years.

<snip>

But we’ve had to struggle to raise even the small sums required for story costs and other operational expenses. Our current spring fund-raising drive, with the modest goal of $10,000, has raised only half that amount with only five days to go.

<snip>

In the meantime, we are trying to raise $5,000 in the next five days.

...more at link...

Thanks,

UIA

Read the whole article...it will make you shake your head or bang it against the wall.

:banghead:

funding media outlets -- I never have understood it. It should have been our first priority starting 5 years ago. I can't believe this is still a controversial issue.

media buys a priority.

A few of us here told as many as we could about he KnightRidder sale and the GOP activist investor who was forcing the sale. I can't believe all those Clinton people who joined investment firms do not explain the importance of a fair media to their groups - - how DUMB can you get?

Fooling America

A talk by Robert Parry given in Santa Monica on March 28, 1993

http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/collections/conspiracies/parryspeech.htm


snip>>

"And what we have seen at the end of these twelve years, and what I guess the challenge of the moment becomes is how that gets changed. How do the American people really get back control of this - not just their government, but of their history - because it's really their history that has been taken away from them. And it's really what the Washington Press Corps and the Democrats in Congress as well as the Republicans are culpable of, was this failure to tell the American people their history. And the reason they didn't was because they knew, or feared, that if the American people knew their real history - whether it goes back to the days of slaughters going on in El Salvador - if they had known about El Mazote - if they had known about the little children that were put in the house and shot to death and garroted - that they wouldn't have gone along with that. And if they had known that there were felony obstructions of justice being carried out of the Oval Office they wouldn't have gone along with that either, and there would have been a real problem - there would have been a political problem to contain I guess, but - it is not the role of the Washington press corp - maybe this is sounds like an understatement, but it's not the role of the Washington press corps to take part in that. Our job was supposed to be, I thought, to kind of tell people what we could find out! We go in, we act nice, we ask a lot of questions, find some things and run out and tell you! We're sort of like spies for the people, you know, and instead, we sort of got in there - and I guess it was real nice, we felt like we were insiders, we felt like these were all nice, respectable men - they dressed well - ..."


snip>>

"What I think is the bottom line of both books is that we are in great danger of losing our grasp of reality as a nation. Our history has been taken away from us in key ways. We've been lied to so often. And important things have been blocked from us. It was important to know that those little children were killed in El Mazote. I have four kids, and I know what they mean to me, and it's always been a part of my journalism that I don't want - that if any of my sons will ever be taken off to war someplace, I want it to be done for a real reason - not because somebody made something up."


snip>>

"The main problem, at this point, is that we have a set of establishments in Washington that have failed us, as a people. Obviously the executive branch did it because it had its goals, and agendas, and it wanted to do these things, and maybe in some cases they were right. But they shouldn't have lied to us. They shouldn't have tried to create a false reality to trick us into this. Congress failed because it didn't have the courage to stand up and do oversight and perform its constitutional responsibilities.

But what is perhaps most shocking to Americans is that the press failed. The press is what people sort of expect to be there as the watchdog, the final group to sort of warn us of danger. And the press joined it. And the press saw itself - in the Washington press corp I'm talking about - saw itself at the elite levels as part of the insider community. And as that evolved and then grew in the 1980's, the press stopped performing its oversight responsibilities. And I think we have to figure out some way, as a people, to change that."

Parry is so honest and so important. We really need to hear what he has to tell us.

and the Kerry voices out there working to expose the crimes of BushInc. The worst act of Clinton's presidency was closing the books for Poppy Bush.

from an email:

As the U.S. death toll in the Iraq War passes 2,500, the Washington Post continues its longstanding campaign to disparage Democratic war critics, this time by calling them people who try to "exploit bad news without appearing to rejoice in it." These ugly charges have been part of the Post's pattern of de-legitimizing dissent against George W. Bush's war policies since 2002.


For the full story of how the biggest Washington daily keeps getting the Iraq War story wrong, go to Consortiumnews.com at http://www.consortiumnews.com .


Thanks to a surge in donations over the final days of our spring fund-raising drive, it appears we will hit and possibly exceed our goal of $10,000. Beyond our thanks for the necessary money, we also want to express our gratitude for the many kind comments that accompanied the donations.


My thanks to all of you!

:applause: