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Online Media: The Real News
Online Media provides an outlet for news mainstream media ignores

by Meeta Shah

The Web, in the opinion of Mary Zepernick, has become the mainstream media's watchdog. Zepernick is the co-coordinator of POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy) and co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom's campaign to Challenge Corporate Power.

The idea that anyone can make himself heard online has motivated many individuals to express their dissent from politicians, majority stockholders, and other members of the power elite. Zepernick writes "I monitor the e-mail for [POCLAD], and find an overwhelming amount of news coming through various people's lists and a few listserves: opinion pieces, articles and announcements of events by a variety of people, items from British papers like the Guardian. This is largely informal, which in my view is important as it's under the radar of the powers-that-be who would try to squash non-corporate media, like independent and "pirate" radio.

Websites like MediaChannel.org and ProjectCensored.org also aim to "get under the radar" and cover the overlooked news, the information you won't read in most newspapers or see on the five o'clock news.

Robert McChesney's Homepage

In a lecture on "Corporate Journalism and the Bogus State of U.S. Democracy" at Illinois State University, Robert McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and host of the weekly radio talk show, "Media Matters," noted that one of the major reasons mainstream media turns a blind eye to so much news is that after the deregulation of telecommunications during the Reagan-Bush era there was "almost a sea change in the attitude of journalists. [Newspapers] have written off the bottom 30%…That's not where the money is; Journalism that serves citizens is lousy for stockholders."

Websites like ProjectCensored, founded by Carl Jensen, were created to bypass the constraints imposed on corporate media. by the demands of the bottom line. As the site explains, "The primary objective…is to explore and publicize the extent of censorship in our society by locating stories about significant issues of which the public should be aware, but is not, for one reason or another. Thereby, the project hopes to stimulate responsible journalists to provide more mass media coverage of those issues and to encourage the general public to demand mass media coverage of those issues or to seek information from other sources."

Each year ProjectCensored puts out of a list of the top 25 censored stories. One of this year's is "Corporate Media Ignores Key Issues of Anti-Globalization Protests." The article explains how "a hard look at more than 200 stories by major news outlets including: ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek, shows serious weaknesses in the coverage of the four largest protests…few news sources reported the police violence [against the protesters], and most sources focused on protester violence." Not surprisingly, the only places in the U.S. that did mention the attacks were online, mostly at sites run by independent news organizations such as Indymedia.org.

Journalists like Greg Palast, referred to by the Fox TV commentator Alan Colmes as "America's journalist hero of the Internet," find that online media is often the only outlet for their stories. Palast uncovered a racially charged scam in Florida during the presidential election of 2000. Rumors of shady dealings spread, but Palast's article, which included hard evidence, did not.

In his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast writes, "In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered local elections supervisors to purge 57, 700 voters from registries on grounds they were felons not entitled to vote in Florida…these voters weren't felons, at most a handful…the voters on the "scrub list" were, notably, African-American (about 54 per cent) and most of the others…were white and Hispanic Democrats." In the United States, Salon.com was the only place that would publish even part of the article.

McChesney mentioned this problem in his lecture, saying that unlike in Europe, "we don't really have public broadcasting in the U.S.; what we have is nonprofit commercial broadcasting," which he contends depends on the upper middle class for donations. This creates a paradox: news that is supposed to serve the general public must appeal to those who can afford to pledge money, catering to those with money and influence.

Zepernick writes, " The internet has certainly enabled more activists to connect; the challenge is to include those who are not online, and to avoid the haste and lack therefore of thought that can accompany electronic communication." Websites like AlterNet aspire to solve this problem by serving as an "infomediary." Such sites are based on the assumption that most websurfers need help finding the ideological slant or political perspective he or she is interested in amid the abundance of information available online, basically to weed through the garden of the Web.

Many people read the front page of The New York Times or turn on Fox News because it's immediately available and quickly digestible. Online media provides many more diverse opinions, but it's usually much harder to find this information then say, turning on the television or skimming the front page of a newspaper.

Hopefully, infomediary sites will help to solve this problem. AlterNet also offers a free weekly newsletter, allowing readers to subscribe to lists covering a headlines, drug news, and media culture. This growing trend of having online news "delivered" is another key step in popularizing online media.

The battle for journalism to include a broader spectrum of opinions and become for democratic is far from over, but with the help of the Internet, the American public has the chance the fight back and have their voices heard. These voices, in turn, must be organized in some fashion in order to greater the ease of its accessibility. However, there is an inherent problem in this: oftentimes, in an attempt to organize news, many dissenting opinions get weeded out in order to make the news more readable.

Will online media overcome this problem and become the place where the most news can be found, or will it become yet another outlet for mainstream media? Hopefully, the Web will live up to its potential and provide an open meeting ground for the general public to find all the news out there.

Related Links

"Holding Corporations Accountable"

Center for Media Education

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Media Access Project

Commercial Culture's Watchdog

-- Meeta Shah is a junior at NYU, pursuing a double major in economics and journalism.

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