Slashdot Mirror
Disinformation.com
The site's left-of-center-pieces -- with generous links to other POVs -- vary wildly in quality and usefulness, but you can find some real gems on disinfo.com. Taken together, the stories on this important, possibly even landmark site are a sharp indictment of the humorless and tepid way the popular media screen out opinion and commentary that's different, provocative or original.
We know too well that most mainstream media -- TV networks, major newspapers and newsmagazines, commercial news web sites -- have been corporatized, homogenized and mass-marketed by profit-obsessed corporate execs from Disney and General Electric. They could as well be -- and simultaneously are -- selling them park tickets and light bulbs as ideas and opinions. Newspapers have grown stupefyingly boring, their commentary relegated to snoozy op-ed pages. Cable TV, once the great hope, is becoming a nightmare of fragmentation, eternal argument and dogmatic fanaticism. Except for slight variations -- Fox News' interesting right-wing tilt, for example -- most mainstream news organizations stock to a militantly moderate point of view, veering a wee bit to the right or a tad to the left but never much further.
The target audience of most major media, from your daily paper to Time and CNN, is the appliance-and-car acquiring middle class, who seem to like their politics tepid and lite, the way AOL users like their Net. With media so firmly in the grip of market research, it's tough to know what they might cover if they were left to their own imaginations.
"Disinformation" is, to say the least, different. It was launched in l996 by Richard Metzger, now edited by Alex Burns. It's arguably one of the best-designed and most interesting alternative news and underground culture sites online. Apart from its own content, the site provides a subculture search engine which directs a reader to sites and relevant links. The site's political bias is clearly leftish, but its links are refreshingly open-minded, incorporating ideas, opinions and responses far beyond traditional definitions of "progressive." In fact, Disinformation is really, in many ways, a dogma killer. Despite the editors' viewpoint, readers get drawn into all sorts of opinions and debates any time they pursue a story or essay.
Apart from the excitement generated by a website that circulates about alternative ideas -- ideas the Net helps to keep alive -- Disinformation is beautifully designed. There's a Disinformation store, of course, offering T-shirts and books. There's easy access to stories by popularity and topic -- from activism and aliens to media, mind control, spirituality and technology. For all the ballyhoo and media hype about sites like Slate, with its heavy Microsoft subsidy, Disinformation really seems to get the fusion between interactivity and ideas. It's an exciting place to browse.
From the beginning, the Net was meant to open up information and give voice to different kinds of people and points of view. The Web, with its hyperlinking, took that idea still further. But in the past few years, that notion seems to have grown tired, in between the copyright wars, the dot.com era and the so-called Net slump. It seemed that corporate America -- Yahoo, MSN and AOL -- was devouring the Web whole. That's why sites like Disinformation are so important. They are the real heart of the Web.
I personally prefer www.fair.org. Disinfo, while interesting, are oftentimes too radical for my taste. It almost seems like they go out of their way to fabricat-err, uncover conspiracy in the name of "no smoke without a fire".
fair.org is more a kind of media watchdog. I like their work. You might too.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Adbusters.comc om
Indymedia.org
WhatReallyHappened.
All interesting media, culture, and commerce critique websites.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Jon Katz would've posted Disinfo, but dog bless him anyway.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Indymedia is full of cooked-up conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic bullshit, and hate-America-first screeds. I've never seen a single bit of useful info there, although they do a great job of highlighting lies like the CNN-fake-Palestinians crap. It's all extremism, support for criminals and murderers, and extreme-left ranting. Forget about it.
WRH is another anti-Semitic junk site that would blame everything on the Mossad and "international bankers" if they could. Not a single useful reference to be found.
I went and read "Death to all cheerleaders," and
it's utter garbage.
I'm sick of this type of satire. It's not necessarily funny or interesting to try to make people look dumb, especially when you're willing to make yourself look dumb to do so. Think Tom Greene. Think "The Daily Show." The death to cheerleaders could be a transcript of a Daily Show interview, it's that unoriginal.
It's easy to make fun of stuff. It's also pointless and boring unless there is some genuine insight to it.
Their articles are so well written that many people actually take them seriously. Unfortunately, I can't compare it to disinfo at the moment, because it (disinfo) seems to have been slashdotted.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
As someone who observed Beckerman's firing from the ADN (Anchorage Daily News) first hand, I must disagree with Katz's statement that he was fired for calling cheerleaders "a urine stain..." That piece passed the scrutiny that the editors desk gave all of the younger writers (the ADN had a number of reporters under the age of 18. they would write a weekly feature (sort of like a kid's page, but a little better) and if they were good, as beckerman was, some of them would get offered columns, usually on mondays)
Beckerman was fired because he was a rude little bastard. He'd badmouth his bosses infront of god 'n everybody, he was rude to the copy editors, he would miss deadlines. He was just a bad employee, and using his death to cheerleaders piece as an excuse for why he was fired is just a ploy.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.