Collective Truth
The way media should be: Independent. Ad-free. Lie-free. Free.
Until people who give a damn creates a news platform controlled by all people, for the creation of collective truth, here are links to news organizations moving us in that direction:
- News Sources:
- News Portals or Aggregators
- Open Publishing
- IndyMedia
- Note: As the boldest experiment in openness, IndyMedia begs the question why isn't it better, more popular, and what can we do to help it meet full potential? Jennifer Whitney's critique in LiP magazine reposted and discussed here is instructive, and the discussion itself is even more instructive. Anonymous posts are a bad idea, and there needs to be a democratic mechanism for keeping useless posts from the default view most people receive, and for 'moving' good but not exactly relevant posts (lyrics of great workers' folk songs) out of the main discussion even as one rates them highly. This paragraph, for instance, would be moved out of the way in such a system.
- Media Criticism
Why care?
- When many people do not have health care, although large majorities of people have long believed every person should have health care... When wars rationalized with lies become unpopular and still drag on... When hundreds of thousands of drug users are imprisoned for activity that hurt no one else, while murders go unsolved and the U.S.'s inefficient, polluting highway system kills outright more than 40,000 people a year ... When the things that matter to our lives barely make a blip on the establishment media radar... It's only our lives at stake.
It takes many truths to form the whole truth. This isn't new; many have said it.
A common place for all those truths to share would be new.
This place would also, necessarily, have lies posing as truth that need exposing. Lies (about the goals of our would-be rulers and about our own aspirations) that too often pass through the media system unchallenged. PWGD news would never lay claim to the complete and sole truth, but it would provide the framework to help people come as close to truth as possible. (The BT in the URL stands for Boston Truth, which would be a part of this open, transparent, democratic news network.)
Until People Who Give a Damn makes this, we point to independent news where the real work is already being done, above: original, important news reporting without corporate or government control.
Contact us (or leave a comment) about creating this software, forming the Boston Truth (or other) newspaper based on these principles, or to suggest another site be added to our off-the-cuff list of recommended sources.