Editorial 10.3, March 2008, by Deirdre Helfferich An Alternative Thought My little blog, written by “the publisher and a couple of other troublemakers,” is a place where I try out ideas, rant a bit, run on ad nauseum about my tribulations as a publisher, and froth at the mouth in virtual space, cheerfully. The web is a liberating place, with communication and pseudonymity easily had in equal measure. Privacy, paradoxically, is very scarce. Naturally, I am very protective of my blogging freedom, uninformed and a bit histrionic though it may sometimes get, and I take umbrage when various legislative types try to constrain it. That’s why I get quite annoyed every time the Federal Communications Commission, charged with protecting the use of public media for the public interest, seems to be more interested in protecting the public media for private interests, as though the neocon ideal of “everything for sale” will result in the public good, when we all know that what it will result in is a corporate artistocracy making a heck of a lot of money by picking our pockets and constraining our access to information. How do I know this? Well, it keeps happening, doesn’t it? The FCC decided on December 18, 2007, to go ahead and allow massive media consolidation—as though having the huge majority of media outlets in this country in the hands of only five or so corporations wasn’t consolidated enough. This, incidentally, is the second or maybe even third time these jokers have tried to give away our broadcast commons. There’s been a public uproar every time, yet the FCC board keeps trying it, as though they can sneak it past when we’re not looking, or maybe they think we’ll just get tired and give up. But public officials can’t fool—or ignore—all of the people all of the time, and the tide of public suspicion about supposedly benevolent regulations like these is rising ever faster. Now there’s a Senate bill that’s been introduced by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, a Resolution of Disapproval, that would overturn this—let me blunt—stupid and short-sighted—decision by the FCC (for more info, take a look at www.stopbigmedia.com). Even if this Congress doesn’t pay attention, I’m betting that the next one will—or else. There’s an election every two years. This is an issue near and dear to the Republic’s heart. Pretty much every other private media outlet in the Tanana Valley, with a few notable exceptions such as the Delta Wind, is owned by a chain. Very, very few are locally owned or independent. The result of this is a curious bland sameness in mainstream media reporting and editorializing. Hear a story one place, it reads the same another place, looks the same in a third. That’s because it’s all from the same source, just repurposed for different media. Looking through clippings last month from Jessen’s Weekly and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner from the mid to late 1960s, I realized with a pang that I used to enjoy reading these papers. Jessen’s went out of business after the flood, and the News-Miner changed tone after they were bought up by an Outside chain. It wasn’t that they stopped reporting on local events, though—they still do that—but they lost something homey, something personal, something, well, Alaskan. The Heartland kept that tone, until the editors—or maybe it was the financiers—axed that section. Now it’s Dermot Cole who keeps the old paper alive, with occasional sparks from individual columnists, headline writers who, I suspect, surreptitiously sneak in innuendo, and, of course, the writers of letters to the editor. I miss that old paper. I grew up with it, and I enjoyed it. Sourdough Sam still had a few teeth back then, and the various editors weren’t afraid to publish strongly-worded opinions. But now? Feh. On KUAC the other day I heard a story about how Al-Queda is using the Internet to do long-distance training in terrorism (“BlowItUpU.com”), what you might call Distributed Chaos Training. This usage, like web porn, is one of the unsavory aspects of complete freedom of information, and this is the sort of news story that provides ammunition for those who want to lock up the Internet and make information of any sort highly regulated and controlled through money-making channels. Community Internet and broadband, low power radio stations (community-based, nonprofit radio stations that operate at 100 watts or less or extend their broadcasting out to only a few miles), public broadcasting—all these expressions of free and public media are under direct legal and fiscal attack. Small incremental blocks to a publicly supported information commons are, in fact, a direct threat to the wellbeing of our democracy, which depends on an educated, informed, and involved populace—not a manipulated, controlled, and nannied one encouraged to be fearful and sheeplike and ignorant (the latter makes it easier to do the former). However, the public is fighting back: the copyleft movement keeps putting things into the public domain so that they’ll stay there. Wikipedia and its related sites (Wikinews, Wikispecies, Wikimedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, etc.) are a powerful example of distributed, noncentralized open-content information sources. They are born of a cooperative effort to produce and preserve free and public intellectual content—a direct contrast in opposition to the profit-oriented effort to privatize the commons (such as our public parks, intellectual property that would have gone into the public domain but for the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, the patenting of life forms, the privatization or outsourcing of government functions, and so on). Wikileaks is a web portal that “is developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis” for the explicit purpose of expanding transparency in government activities and protecting whistleblowers, opening leaked documents “to stronger scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency can provide.” Blogs have already revolutionized the media and shown the power of the Internet to upset the status quo and spread both rumor and truth like wildfire. Our entire concept of privacy is changing because of it. Yet it’s not just web-related media that support this kind of decentralized, public spread of information. The ’zine, alternative print magazines that may be as simple as a folded sheet of paper to elaborate multipage art objects, are self-published, small-circulation, noncommercial publications that have their roots in the pamphleteering of revolutionaries in France, the American Colonies, and so on, back to the invention of the printing press. With alternative information sources like these, it’s the thought that counts, not the profit. And that makes all the difference in the world.
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