News Sources

The disconnect between print, television and internet news has grown increasingly evident lately. For years, only profit-engendering news was deemed worthy of space on the paper that once grew as trees in our forests or the airwaves that belong to us all. Now that we’ve got a medium that hasn’t been thoroughly corrupted by greed yet, independent sites like Buzzflash, Truthout, Alternet, and Common Dreams are publishing items that become huge scandals months down the line on traditional news sources.

As an inveterate news junkie, I can’t help but wonder why it takes so long for these juicy scandals to filter through to the mainstream. My current theory is that news is broken to satisfy a larger meta-need of those with enough power to be influencing the media. Perhaps it was useful for them to have the Bush administration around for a couple of years to de-regulate and give huge handouts to the insanely wealthy, but the economy is doing just badly enough to require a regime change, if you will, so that they can eventually get back to the mountains of eyeballs of the days of yore, and beyond. Maybe by then they’ll have figured out how to restrict web publishing to a few corporate entities, and we’ll have to invent another medium to be free in.