Time for a Reality Check, on A Bigger Tent and Beyond

It began during the Iraq Invasion. Whenever I tuned into CNN, up until then my first choice in news, I found myself evermore weary and frustrated with the sanitized, "we're more butch than FOX News" war coverage displayed on their USA network. It seemed that all the commercial American networks, what with their officially sanctioned and censored embeds and the like, had been relegated to mere sports announcers dutifully calling the game and towing the administration's line. More and more often I would surf over to CNN International, which I found to be significantly less slanted towards a coalition of the willing cheerleading role, and about as often to NWI, the CBC's cable news network piped to the US. Geez, what a difference editing makes! It was like they were covering a completely different war than the American news channels.That was the tipping point for the Ringmaster. I no longer watch any commercial US news channels or programs, though I have become a regular Link TV viewer and on rare occasion, when I'm viewing during the dinner hour, I catch PBS's News Hour which at this point features the fairest and most diverse coverage among the mainstream US networks. And as for radio, I listen to NPR in the car, but switch to streaming BBC world service once at work. Oh, and I'd like to note here for the record that, though intrigued and excited about the potential of Al Gore's new Current TV network, I was more than a bit saddened when NWI was replaced by it last week. One can only hope that the promise of featuring content from independent young producers and journalists from around the globe will mitigate that loss somewhat. We shall see.

It was last week while watching one of the NWI farewell segments poignantly delivered by Peter Mansbridge, the ever understated anchor of the CBC's The National, that I pledged to do something about the lack of diverse views in American broadcast journalism (You gotta love Peter, BTW. His on air persona makes Al Gore seem downright manic. But I digress). After a brief mulling over, the course of action I decided on was to launch an online alternative and independent news feed aggregator featuring a mix of the most reliable sources I could find among such outlets that have feeds available.

Happily, there are more than a few source sites that do have feeds and I settled on textual ones from the always excellent coverage of AlterNet, Common Dreams, and WorldPress.org. I plan to add more feeds that meet a reasonable sniff test for reliability as I locate them; recommendations are always welcome. I will also add a podcast section starting with DemocracyNow's offering and a Vlog (video blog) section as well, when and if I can track down those feeds or convince one or more of the fine indy television news organizations listed in the lower right of A Bigger Tent's homepage to make that available. Again recommendations are welcome.

By now inquiring minds may be asking, why the heck are you doing this Ringmaster? You really must have waaaaaaaay too much time on your hands. Let me assure that's not the case and then hear me out. The benefit here as I see it is twofold. First, every additional outlet for these independent news sources that is effectively promoted adds a proportional amount of public exposure for them and their under-exposed stories. Second, and perhaps more importantly, exposing these feed items as links back to the source news in a search crawl-able page has an, again, proportional Google bomb effect and can help raise the ranking for these stories and sites within Google's search results. So if a sufficient number of aggregator sites follow suit we could theoretically have, say, AlterNet's coverage of Dafur returned in the same first page results as MSNBC or the like. And from my perspective, that would be a very good thing indeed.

Therefore I encourage any and all readers who might "feel my pain" regarding the evermore dismal state of American mainstream journalism to launch their own news aggregators. If you need a configurable package for this I can highly recommend Drupal, A bigger Tent's source package, and Drupal's progeny CivicSpace which is also a grassroots organizing tool that now even sports a compatible open source CRM component.

Oh, and I almost forgot the name: Reality Check in a Bigger Tent. Unfortunately, realitycheck.org is currently being sat on by one of those enterprising domain-broker outfits who rank up there with spammers and used car salesman in the Ringmaster's book (ah, capitalism...). But I'm stickin with the name, if for no other reason than the existence of it's antithetical evil twin, The Reality Check, a right wing Christian spin factory Ralph Reed would I'm sure be proud of; assuming he doesn't already run it that is. As for their reality, I think so highly of it that I'm considering forwarding them some of the numerous spam offers I get for discount anti-psychotics (ah, democracy..).

Now The Ringmaster will be the first to admit that all journalism, if not reality itself, is inherently subjective and the truth as hawked by any and all news outlets is always a matter of degree if not opinion. And it is certain that most if not all of the sources included in A Bigger Tent's Crucial Media Link listing have a political or philosophical axe to grind; even if that axe is merely that news should indeed be independent, diverse and accessible. Therefore I'm taking the approach that more is better, as in a greater diversity of accessible and independent news can only serve to strengthen our democracy. After all, real democracy is about putting the best available information in front of the people and then letting them decide. If by this initiative, I can put a little more information in front of a few more eyes then I will have succeeded. I will have because I trust that the people, armed with the truth as it manifests itself through a broad range of sources, will inevitably act on the side of a more peaceful, just and sustainable future. I invite you to join me in this goal and this futue.