While millions around the world circulate today with trepidation in fear of the Beast, I prefer to instead take a break from the usually ideologically charged subjects that predominate on this blog, and ponder a more subjective subject. Given the numerous sources of information and opinion, in a variety of forms, what sources do we personally rely upon and what does it say about ourselves?

As for me, I have cable television at home, but it is a basic package, so, rather fortuitously, I do not have CNN or Fox News. I am always shocked when I have the opportunity, such as during a vacation, to observe what they broadcast. Most recently, while in Canada, I encountered the new CNN strategy for fighting Fox: demonize undocumented people by running a seemingly endless sequence of programs of white male, purported journalists villifying them for everything except the loss of the war in Iraq (after all, the military is relying upon undocumented enlistees to enforce the occupation). Rather strange, given the number of them, as well as the millions of others who respond negatively to such demagoguery, like myself, but I guess that CNN management has decided that white supremacy generates higher ratings than multiculturalism. For the rest of you who are exposed to CNN and Fox daily, I suspect that one cannot avoid being desensitized to the frequently absurd and offensive material that is pawned off as news by carny barkers like Lou Dobbs, Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper.

So, where do I go for information? Of course, as with millions of others, the short answer is the Internet. But what sites? Naturally, this changes over time, but some sites are enduring in terms of their quality and importance. For news, there are three critical sites. Antiwar.com, despite being run by libertarians with whom I frequently have disagreements, is the essential portal for global news. Decades from now, people will recall that checking out Antiwar.com was one of the first things they did in the morning, just as, in previous times, people used to read the New York Times or the Washington Post. Started back in 1996, it first captured, and then shaped, emerging opposition to the expansion of the American Empire in the shadow of the fall of Soviet Communism, an expansion that, contrary to American liberals, predates the presidency of Bush the II. It also provides some of the most insightful, eclectic political opinion and analysis around. With the failed invasion and occupation of Iraq, it now documents the rotting away of this empire daily in real time, and, for this, it will be remembered. It recognized and continues to relentlessly spotlight the most important issue of our times: the pernicious consequences of American imperialism for both Americans and everyone else around the world.

Next, there is Asia Times Online. ATol, as it describes itself, is an invaluable source of news and opinion, because it focus upon the intersection of the purported "war on terror", the Middle East and US policy to control the resources of Central Asia and the means by which they are delivered to the rest of the world. It publishes extensive news and analysis from non-American, non-European sources, such as reporters and commentators from Pakistan, India, China and Iran. Hence, ATol conveys an indigenous vision of the world in marked contrast to the neoliberal, colonial perspective of American media.

Lastly, there is the Manchester Guardian, that entertaining, delightful online version of a newspaper that the United States is incapable of producing. Of course, there is something inevitably anglophilic about reading the Guardian, and in the great scheme of things, it isn't especially radical. It does, however, unlike American newspapers, create a mainstream space for a a broad range of news, opinion and culture, free of the need to self censor to satisfy neoconservative bosses and avoid the provincial, intolerant attacks of fundamentalists. Strangely enough, I actually do frequently read the columnists of the Guardian, and that is very telling, because I rarely read them in American newspapers, as they have been rendered irrelvant by bloggers. The Guardian confronts the challenge of the Internet with its own diversity, while American newspapers persist in whiny, puerile attacks upon the "fever swamps" of blogs, as they continue to market increasingly discredited neoconservative policies.

Labels: Alternative Media, American Empire, Libertarians, Mainstream Media