My Editorials Printed in the State Times

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Where Have All the Little People Gone? --Printed September 3, 2003 How many of you have heard about the close capture of Saddam over the months of summer?  How many times on the commercial news channels have you heard the cheesy, melodramatic music before they flash the words, “War on Terror” like it is going out of fashion?  “All too often,” you say? I Agree. Now, how many of you have heard about the heat wave that is killing thousands over in India? Or do you know that a massive number of people in Zimbabwe are starving because they are in a severe grain deficit and their government won’t import any?  I bet you didn’t. If perchance you have heard of the last situations mentioned, then you most likely obtained the information from an independent media/news source. It is good to see some people look outside the commercially-bought box every now and then. The problem with the news today is that not only is it one-sided, but you can pick up three different newspapers, and they all say the same thing that people such as myself are sick of hearing. Take this past summer for example, how many news channels did you happen to pass by that were not showing the mangled faces of Uday and Qusay? I suppose media companies are afraid that people are turning away from the news because of the “no proof” factor. If I were the new editor of the New York Times, I would worry about running into that kind of a situation.  Do these news people mean to annoy readers by printing what everyone else is printing? Probably not, but they have no choice; they have to appease the advertisers, investors and beat out the competition by having more colorful graphics and better, bolder headlines; after all, we all know that is what people pay the most attention to anyway. Is this compromising the public’s information and perception of what is happening around the world? What is the price of pure, unbiased, news? Unless people have massive amounts of money to travel around the world and experience news first hand, they are only hearing and believing what corporate bigwigs want to be published. Therefore, the independent source has become a rarity, almost an extinct species lost in the thick jungle of commercialism. I was not going to touch the political content of the news, but there is something that needs to be said.  If the United States is going to get its nose in every other country’s business, why don’t we physically start going into places like Africa and start helping those burdened with warfare, disease and famine instead of just sending money, hitting people from the air with these food packages containing peanut butter and dry crackers, and then hoping for the best? It’s as if we’re saying, “Hi people of (insert third world nation), we see that you’re in dire conditions, so here’s a moist towelette to cry in. Best Regards, the USA.” I did a search on CNN.com for ‘African Guerrilla Warfare’ and the most decent recent article that came up was from 1999. Even if other mainstreamed news sources reported on this subject, how many times do you think it actually made front page news or had anything more than a paragraph in the ‘in brief’ section of the newspaper? We know guerrilla warfare exists all over the world, but we have to ask ourselves, why do they fight? What’s going on over there that can be so bad? This is where the major news companies fail. However, the independent source will go behind the lines (not in a Geraldo Rivera kind of way) and work to inform on the news nobody else reports on.

Sometimes it may not be very interesting, but I always like to hear both sides of a situation, so why wouldn’t I want my news that way? Here’s another thing to think about. On the news, all I hear is about how much of a deficit we are in. Of course, this means just about nothing to me, but when you tell me that aid to needed services needs to be cut, such as Medicare, Head Start, and increases in tuition and all kinds of insurance need to happen to help relieve the blow of “the deficit,” there is something seriously wrong. While some people may have the mentality to help others before ourselves, which is fine, I think we need to help this country function and move the people in a forward direction before setting out to make world peace and other glorified impossibilities, none of which should have a price tag. So how does an independent news source function?  As with many companies, they have intelligent writers and editors, most have investors to fund their operation; some newspapers have branch sources all over the world, such as Independent News & Media centrally located in Dublin, Ireland who has branches everywhere but not in the United States. Independent newspapers and magazines in the United States can range from radical to middle-of-the-road, standard political news; religious and ethnicity; and local, community news; and even college newspapers, such as The State Times. As Americans, we need to be proud of the fact that there are people who produce news that corporate companies will not touch. There are still many countries where the people can’t speak their mind, believe in what they want to openly, cannot write what they feel or even know the truth about their own country. I am not saying that the United States should open up these types of nations and mold them to our typical western ways, but I think if someone has something to say, they should just say it without fear of the censorship police coming after them. Then the question comes in, how much can one person say? I’ll leave that question to future editorials.