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.
This is cool and I have visited their site previously, but some of the stuff just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Its one thing to wish for untainted information, stive for truth and freedom, and quite another to spew frothing at the mouth about it, hidden in an amongst what appear to be good information.
AND it is yet even more of a shame when a whole bunch of conspiracy seeking, alien hunting, govermentphobes start giving, us good truth seekers a bad name....
Wheres the tin foil hat when you sighn up to their site, I thought that wsa a requirment.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
And just how is Marty Beckerman's taunting a cheerleader different from the "cool kids" taunting "geeks" as was roundly condemned in the Hell Mouth articles? He sounds like a complete jerk to me.
He's hated because he's obviously an idiot!
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... stupefyingly boring... Cable TV, once the great hope, is becoming a nightmare of fragmentation, eternal argument and dogmatic fanaticism.
This paragraph is inherently contradictory. On the one hand we have unacceptable media which homogenized, on the other unacceptable media which is too fragmented (never mind that cable TV channels usually follow a theme rigorously, which isn't fragmented at all, imho). On the one hand, the commentary is too boring, yet on the other it's too argumentative and fanatical. Katz can't decide which he likes less or why. What he does know is he found something likely to rile people up that kind of agrees with his left-of-center politics and that he has a column to write. So here we are. Filtering Katz stories is almost enough to make one log in to Slashdot.
The net has never succeeded in promoting free expression of ideas. Instead it has founded enclaves of like-thinking people, who need to have their own point of view reinforced by others. Take Slashdot for example -- a community of people who have similar views about free software and intellectual property law. When was the last time a justification of Microsoft's tactics was posted to the front page, without an immediate rebuttal? Or a repudiation of the GPL? The readership here wouldn't stand for it, because that's not what they are here for ... not free expression, but validation.
Really, we shouldn't be surprised that the "mainstream" media is boring -- most people don't like to hear views that strongly conflict with their own. This is a consequence of the popularization of the internet, and Slashdot is an example of that in microcosm.
"Alternative media" sites like disinformation.com are no different. They have their own axioms (the media is lying; the police are out to get you; corporations will enslave the world), their own jargon, and their own orthodoxy. Read an "alternative paper" for a while and you'll see what I mean.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Now true, I will grant that the first aim of the mainstream media is to make money, and thus, they are going to select the news stories that will attract the highest viewership. Which means if they have to drop details to keep people falling asleep and candycoat issues without stretching the truth, they will do so. There does exist some indy media that is less worried on the profit and more worried on the truth, and will report in greater depth than typical newsblurbs. However, again, the target audience for these indy media are not the population at large, but generally intellicuals that want more information than the mainstream can give them. Then of course, there is the indy media that goes on as little information as possible to stretch the truth as decribed above.
As from MIB: "A person is smart; people are dumb", and all that the national media is doing is catering to people. Indy media, in most cases, is trying to cater to persons. The same thing with AOL; AOL and most big content creators cater towards people - independant sites (such as /.) cater towards persons, and just as with the media, some of these indy sites are good and details, while some are poor and over-the-top. That's what you get when you limit the scope of your audience and worry more on the content than about the profit.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
(The obvious retort, of course, is that it's only because the right is so unfair...)
Got Rhinos?
From Disinfo's main "Paranormal" page:
"It is interesting to see how the Internet's development has been hand-in-hand with the mass proliferation of inter-dimensional information. The reptilian phenomenon is of the astral or imaginal realm. The process of our coming to grips with the possible existence of reptilians, and fully comprehending the dimension of the mind, has the potential to trigger a larger awareness of our own multidimensionality, our spirituality and our relationship with Creation."
Yeah. I been thinkin that for years.
I just can't be bothered to sift through crap like this to possibly find something somewhere in there worth reading. Generally, when I hear something like:
"links are refreshingly open-minded, incorporating ideas, opinions and responses far beyond traditional definitions of 'progressive.'"
I consider it code for "they'll print any damn thing, even if it's silly, badly written, and completely devoid of usefulness." And sure enough, that's usually the correct assumption.
Some of this stuff, I'm sure, is ignored by the Man because it challenges the status quo. But for much of it, well, there's probably a good reason why it's never been picked up by the mainstream media: it sucks.
-brennan
Anyway, the 'Media Patrol' over at cursor.org is much more my cup of tea - it draws a lot on the mainstream press (American and foreign) but does so in a way to point out the deeper issues and expose the spin that major media puts on things.
Let's see, we don't like mass media because the information they present is filtered, edited, spun, and content-stripped away until there's little left besides indoctrinary pablum fit for the lowest-common-denominator viewer, John & Joanne Q. Public.
But we LIKE disinformation.com because the information they present is filtered, edited, spun, and content-stripped away until there's little left besides indoctrinary pablum fit for the lowest-common-denominator "independent thinker", John & Joanne Q. Public.
Oh yeah, sure. That's a HUGE improvent.
Granted, disinfo.com is much more of the category of "oh look at me, I'm a free-thinker not beholden to mass-media" club, or perhaps the "look I'm different like everyone else" category. IMO you're just sucking at a different tit, and fooling yourself that it's more 'significant' because it's not mainstream. Well, sorry, that only means its got fewer error-checking hurdles.
The 'real' web is what you make of it, not what someone shoves in your face as 'important'. I choose my content, and I find my own primary sources. I refuse to see ideolgue-flavored ranting as an example of the best the web can be, rather, it's an example of the crap that one has to wade through to GET to the good parts.
And by the way, in re Marty's rant about cheerleaders: maybe we will never know if there is a higher power, but it certainly IS relevant, or does he disagree with Pascal's logic in the matter?
-Styopa
If you were living under a left wing oriented government, "fair" would most likely be right-wing biased :)
Don't belive everything you read!
Read as much as you can from independent sources. somewhere between the lines there should be the real objective news, neither left, righ, pro or against.
Seldom have I found any piece of news that does not try to influence the way you think, by emphasising some aspects while neglecting others.
In the words of Mike Haggar, have my ears gone insane? All the Web has ever offered as it became popular are 10,000 different versions of the truth. As wrong as The Media can get things sometimes, it's simply fantasy to think that the Internet has it any better. In fact, it's probably worse because at least in the mainstream media their profile is high enough that when misinformation is caught, it is brought to light and reputations are tarnished. I know this has happened to some of the news shows on the tube. On the Web it's every man for himself and there is no penalty for misinformation. It always worries me when people say, "Guess what I read on the Internet..."
I don't believe Katz even thinks about the drivel he writes anymore. It's all reflexive, a mechanical stringing together of words. "We all know", "media this", "always has been", "corporate that". This man is nothing more than a puppet, an empty shell, his cliched writing an empty husk around stale fantasy and bankrupt ideology. I don't believe a word he writes.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
When Fox News says "fair", they mean "left"? "Fair and Balanced" they continuously declare. You find similar statements on "creation science" webpages.
As a radical leftist, I am more likely to describe leftist politics as "good". Leftists say someone has "good politics", rightists say someone is "fair" or "reasonable" or "impartial."
Fair, balanced or impartial are adjectives usually used by someone who wants to put forward the idea that what they are saying is at the political center (or inherently obvious and not subjective in nature). This is much more common among rightists - at least in the states, there is a common misconception by those on the right about where the political center of this country really is. Now, by international standards, the US is a right wing country, it's true. Elsewhere in the world, I'm sure there are countries where people on the left are deluded into thinking that the majority of the population agrees with them, because enough people are on the far left that they can get away with it.
In the states, however, no-one thinks that leftists are in the majority! There are people who sincerely believe that Bush Jr. is a centrist.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
What amazingly transparent adolescent sexual frustration. "Oh, women find me abhorrent, so I'll vent my spleen on the American symbol of desirability." No wonder they don't let more 18 year olds write for newspapers. JonKatz has done it again, ladies and germs: he's found profundity in an intellectual vacuum, and proferred it to us as something worthwhile. Slashdot is really going down the tubes these days.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
http://www.silent-tristero.com
As usual, you leftists continually miss the point. Rush Limbaugh and the rest are commentators and opinionators, not journalists. Their audience is self-selecting, being people who want to listen for entertainment purposes or to find someone whom they already agree with. Commentators do not set the agenda of the news cycle; they comment on it.
The people who are setting the agenda in the newsrooms are the actual journalists, who are heavily biased to the left, as has been demonstrated numerous times in opinion polling of elite journalists; typically 90% or more of whom vote a straight left-wing Democratic Party ticket; several more of whom vote even further to the left, and only a small remaining handful vote partly or wholly for right-wing candidates and issues.
Of course this is no accident, as the media culture heavily enforces this left-wing consensus, and the universities and journalism schools ensure a steady stream of indoctrinated new recruits. These people may not be hard-core leftists of the type out in the streets smashing windows, but they are equivalent to the tenured radicals of the universities, and every bit as smug.
Anyway, Fox News is not conservative; it just has more conservative commentators than is usual, and allows a bit more of the conservative viewpoints to enter into the news. It allows them to be marginally different from all of the other news channels, and thereby attract the disgruntled conservative audience which feels ill used by all of the rest of the media.