alternative media

During the 80 years following 1789 that it took for the French Revolution to acheive its aims as the Third Republic, the people of the third estate (that is neither church nor noble) launched many newspapers and founded many societies where they could meet and discuss matters. With the support of the church and the powerful, the State attempted to close down all these newspapers and to prevent people from distributing them. Finally meetings became almost impossible. Because of this, the 1848 revolution was organised through a series of massive banquets, held all over France, at one stage, on an average of every three weeks. Maybe this is what ordinary Americans should do, because their political masters certainly want to scuttle any real political debate by targeting the alternative media - starting with the US's Alex Jones, an independent radio show host operating from Texas. Jones is possibly the biggest threat to the corporate 'mainstream' media. The Alex Jones Channel on YouTube existed for over ten years and reputedly had over a billion views, [1] but it has suddenly been banned by YouTube.

70 per cent of Syrians voted in referendum to end one party rule and to have elections but have been hit by EU sanctions anyway. Aljazeera reported that no-one would vote, but it seems that a lot did. Basically the world is dividing into an Eastern and Western bloc over this, with Russia and China supporting Syria's right to settle its own affairs and the US and other Anglophone western nations and the EU are looking for a pretext to intervene and threatening crippling sanctions. Further down we might expect EU imposition of a no-fly zone to give them an excuse to invade, as has already happened in Libya. Is the end-objective to isolate Iran for its oil reserves? What's up? Here are some views.

The problem with Mr Murdoch's newspaper empire is not just unethical behaviour by his journalists. It goes much deeper. With the alarming concentration of media ownership in Australia and the advent of PR driven journalism, for the sake of democracy, the public must support independent media. David Donovan comments.

This is a telling report on the mainstream media's coverage of events over a few days compared to that of a major alternative. Turn off Murdoch, 7, 9, 10 and the ABC and tune into RT Media if you are tired of being treated like a fool.

Google may permit giant corporations to control internet accessibility. Several news outlets reported yesterday that Google and Verizon are about to cut a deal that would allow giant corporations to control which websites load slowly, quickly, or not at all. The upshot would be that the multimedia and governments would once again hog the internet to the exclusion of democratic alternatives.