Check these out:
LINKS

YES! MAGAZINE. Perhaps the single most inspiring journal you could read, you will find us referring to Yes! Magazine frequently. It's banner says it all: A Journal of Positive Futures.

COMMON DREAMS. A progressive activist organization, Common Dreams maintains a News Center that is comprehensive and current.

NEW DIMENSIONS is an independent producer of broadcast programs by explorers in the realm of our evolving body mind and spirit. Tapes of these programs are available.

HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN. The online version of this crisp and provocative and usually humorous newsletter: it's worth subscribing to the paper edition.

MORE LINKS . . .

BOOKS

Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, by Robert McChesney. An excellent short introduction to the need for media reform in the United States.

Information War, by Nancy Snow. Documents the close ties between intelligence agencies and a compliant media that is more interested in generating advertising revenues than meaningful debate, and shows how the Pentagon increasingly defines what gets reported.

The Progressive Guide to Alternative Media and Activism, edited by Project Censored. A resource for activists, this Open Media pamphlet provides contacts to alternative media organizations around the country.

A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America, by David Armstrong. A history of radical and progressive publications in the US.

MORE BOOKS . . .

JOURNALS
Good Information
and Alternative Media

If we are to make good decisions in our personal lives and as citizens of our greater community, we need accurate information and reliable communication. We need to hear differing and broad points of view. We need truth, scientific evidence and facts about our world. Democracy relies on good information and truth. The concentration of media ownership by a few corporations, secrecy and “spin” are the true enemies of democracy.

“Some journalists are stubbornly pursuing the truth despite growing monopolies, government secrecy, ideology, and public relations spin doctors—but it’s getting tougher.” Bill Moyers continues, “A profound transformation is happening. The framers of our nation never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing, and big broadcasters ever saw eye-to-eye in putting the public need for news second to their own interests—and to the ideology of free-market economies.” Does it say something about our mass media that even as late as September 2004 forty-nine percent of Americans still believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Increasingly, Americans are becoming aware that concentrated ownership of media is bad for democracy and are taking action to stop media conglomerates from getting even bigger. At the same time, alternative, independent and non-commercial media are gaining support.

“If we are to have the kinds of public conversations essential to taking our serious dilemmas from climate change to criminal justice reform, we need forums for these conversations. The media can facilitate the conversations or shut them down. They can open up or constrain our beliefs about what is possible, what is desirable, who is deserving and which perspectives are legitimate. Our media are where we create our future. Our hope lies in the scrappy, independent writers, publishers and broadcasters who have something to say and will not be silenced, and the activists who are insisting that media have the independence to give us the real stories of our time.” (Sarah Van Gelder, editor of YES! Magazine, which did a comprehensive issue on “The Media that Sets Us Free,” in Spring 2005.