Sound of the Underground

We're living in historic times.

The main stream media is fragmenting before our eyes. Newspaper circulation is dropping and tv news audiences are decreasing. Brainwashing was a key discussion point at the last Cogers debate I attended. Everything feels different. It feels like people are getting it. No really.

I'm taking part in a citizen's "Push Back", that is, a set of bloggers have signed up to write on their assigned day on the subject of media bias towards the Iraq war and what we've discovered that contrasts with 'old media' reporting.

Our small undercurrent could be just the start.

What if every blogger, all 21 million of them including the 2 million in China, wrote one post this year, pointing out the flaws in a news story that they had direct knowledge of? I think it's happening now in a rather haphazard fashion. But what if that was the deal? No free blogger software unless you commit to writing just one post on the subject.

The Queen of our Push Back is Andi, at Andi's World. She's got so much on her plate right now, what was she thinking, coming up with this idea and geeing us all along?

It's a great idea. Today it's the turn of 'rightfielder', who's managed to find a couple of articles from 'old media' that report on the war in a new, improved way, read the whole thing here. One covers the increased engagement of the Iraqi population in the political process and one reports on the in-fighting going on between the terrorist groups.

I'm particularly interested in terrorists in Iraq who are foreigners and the second article has this interesting sentence: "Al Qaeda is dominated by non-Iraqis."

The mainstream media has a vested interest in this war. They've got a business to run. If they've got shocking stories to tell, their old data suggests this increases their audience. I'd like part of the push back to include pushing the off button.

"News stands for nothing educational worth seeing" Gavin de Becker, Fear Less, 2002