Disinformation.com 359
The site's left-of-center-pieces -- with generous links to other POVs -- vary wildly in quality and usefulness, but you can find some real gems on disinfo.com. Taken together, the stories on this important, possibly even landmark site are a sharp indictment of the humorless and tepid way the popular media screen out opinion and commentary that's different, provocative or original.
We know too well that most mainstream media -- TV networks, major newspapers and newsmagazines, commercial news web sites -- have been corporatized, homogenized and mass-marketed by profit-obsessed corporate execs from Disney and General Electric. They could as well be -- and simultaneously are -- selling them park tickets and light bulbs as ideas and opinions. Newspapers have grown stupefyingly boring, their commentary relegated to snoozy op-ed pages. Cable TV, once the great hope, is becoming a nightmare of fragmentation, eternal argument and dogmatic fanaticism. Except for slight variations -- Fox News' interesting right-wing tilt, for example -- most mainstream news organizations stock to a militantly moderate point of view, veering a wee bit to the right or a tad to the left but never much further.
The target audience of most major media, from your daily paper to Time and CNN, is the appliance-and-car acquiring middle class, who seem to like their politics tepid and lite, the way AOL users like their Net. With media so firmly in the grip of market research, it's tough to know what they might cover if they were left to their own imaginations.
"Disinformation" is, to say the least, different. It was launched in l996 by Richard Metzger, now edited by Alex Burns. It's arguably one of the best-designed and most interesting alternative news and underground culture sites online. Apart from its own content, the site provides a subculture search engine which directs a reader to sites and relevant links. The site's political bias is clearly leftish, but its links are refreshingly open-minded, incorporating ideas, opinions and responses far beyond traditional definitions of "progressive." In fact, Disinformation is really, in many ways, a dogma killer. Despite the editors' viewpoint, readers get drawn into all sorts of opinions and debates any time they pursue a story or essay.
Apart from the excitement generated by a website that circulates about alternative ideas -- ideas the Net helps to keep alive -- Disinformation is beautifully designed. There's a Disinformation store, of course, offering T-shirts and books. There's easy access to stories by popularity and topic -- from activism and aliens to media, mind control, spirituality and technology. For all the ballyhoo and media hype about sites like Slate, with its heavy Microsoft subsidy, Disinformation really seems to get the fusion between interactivity and ideas. It's an exciting place to browse.
From the beginning, the Net was meant to open up information and give voice to different kinds of people and points of view. The Web, with its hyperlinking, took that idea still further. But in the past few years, that notion seems to have grown tired, in between the copyright wars, the dot.com era and the so-called Net slump. It seemed that corporate America -- Yahoo, MSN and AOL -- was devouring the Web whole. That's why sites like Disinformation are so important. They are the real heart of the Web.
Weird timing... (Score:2, Interesting)
How about this? [cnn.com]
too much for my place of work (Score:3, Interesting)
"Access to this web page is restricted at this time.
Reason: The Websense category "Alternative Journals" is filtered.
URL: http://www.disinfo.com/"
I guess some how what I would have read there would have made me a worse employee? I am glad they saved my eyes from seeing that!
. . . ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh Bah (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you want to know about? Type it into the search box. Check your results. Read the ones that are interesting. Alter your criteria. Try it again.
Use their links to read newspapers from all around the world. Use babelfish to translate a German page to English.
I have all of the information I could possibly need at my fingertips through a combination of Google, Lexis-Nexis and sites like Everything2 and the Guerilla News Network. I have opposing viewpoints, case studies, major media coverage, independent media coverage, essays and fiction based upon pretty much every major event in the last twenty years. Going back a bit, the completeness level goes down for all but the most major of events, but nonetheless.
The Internet allows anyone to put anything up. Google allows you to find it. Your brain allows you to parse, to judge, and to collate it.
The third part of that equation is the important one.
If you're still using major media to define your worldview, you haven't understood a thing about what the internet has done (nevermind what it was supposed to do or what it should do in the future). I check in with major media sites because they tend to be well laid out. When I actually want the information, all of it, that's when MSN and CNN can kiss my ass good-bye, because they do not and never have provided anything more than sound bites.
Which is pretty much what Disinfo does, except with a snotty, leftist bent that doesn't do much more than pre-emptively derail most of the discussion that occurs.
The heart of the web? No. Just another meta. The heart of the web is that anybody with access to a PC and 20 minutes to learn can put a basic webpage up that will be indexed by Google so that somebody like me can stumble across it.
Google and the WayBack machine are the killer apps of the net. The provider of the content (Disinfo or whomever) don't matter. That's just branding.
And, hey, wasn't the 'Net going to take us away from all that? Or is it acceptable in the case of clearly lefty-biased sites?
yeesh (Score:4, Interesting)
You Are Being Lied To. (Score:2, Interesting)
it is a dead tree distillation of much of the best content of disinfo.com. there is something that is both offensive to, and confirming of the pet conspiracy theories of, just about anyone.
Marty... (Score:5, Interesting)
Did anyone actually follow the link, read, and then take Marty's work serious at all?
Initially, I read the header:
Marty Beckerman is an 18-year-old humor and opinion columnist living in tropical Anchorage, Alaska. His award-winning writing has appeared most frequently in The Anchorage Daily News, though occasionally manages to pop up in finer national publications.
and thought, wow this is interesting, a young adult doing some actual work as a columist and apparently being successful... But then I actually read part of the body of his work labeled You Just Can't Lose when Jesus is on Your Cheerleading Squad.
After reading the first page of his column, I stopped and returned to the top of the page to make sure I read this correctly:
Beckerman's first book, Death to All Cheerleaders: One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity was published September 2000 on Infected Press.
What sort of crack addict book company would publish the crap this kid is writing... well Infected Press I guess, but the question was rather hypothetical, heh.
This kid is not a columnist, nor does this work represent that he is able to relay any sort of humor. Although, it appeared that he was attempting to do some sort of column with some investigative reporting included in order to back up... the... uh... opinions? or something I guess... that he had. The column started off ok, not of very high quality but decent enough to continue reading. But there are various points in the column when you can realize that this guy is actually just a jackass trying to rant a few loose viewpoints. Here, he starts off asking about the modesty in the cheerleader's dress, and then before the topic has even been finished he throws in an inflammable remark-type question that the guest responds to anyhow (Marty = MB, Guest = Rose):
MB: You dress more modestly?
Rose: Yes.
MB:
Rose: Right.
MB: They're like, knee-level instead of mid-thigh, or what?
Rose: No.
MB: By the way, how does Jesus tie into cheerleading again?
Where did this guy get his interviewing skills? Seems like he pulled them out of his ass. Note to self: Never pull interviewing skills out of Marty's ass, you can get better ones out of your own ass.
He then goes on to ask completely ridiculous questions in what apparently is supposed to be a semi-serious interview:
MB: Would you ever, like, consider taking one of the girls' pompoms and painting it green, and then setting it on fire so it would be like the Burning Bush or something?
Rose: No. We're not extremists.
MB: But that would be hilarious, wouldn't it?
Apparently, Rose thinks she is too good for my question.
This could maybe be classified under humor (section: lame) but what is it doing in an interview within an investigative opinion column? This is ridiculous.
The first page then ends with this portion of a second interview with the president of another Christian Cheerleading Organization:
"So obviously both cheerleading and religion have come under scrutiny and criticism over the years," I say. "How would you respond to people who might themselves say 'Death To All Cheerleaders And There Is No God?'"
"They would say what?" Coleman inquires.
"You heard me," I inform. "They would say cheerleading is worthless, and then go preach glorious Atheism."
"Anytime you get students involved in anything extracurricular, that's meaningful. You get them off the streets. Cheerleading is a character-builder, and there's a lot of positive things you can learn from athletics. As for faith, I think you have to walk the walk."
It's at this point in the conversation I realize I'm completely bored, and proceed to hang up the phone. Fuck walking.
You can finally sort of see where this kid is coming from: a place of no direction, morality, or ethics. He starts out with an inflammable question, hoping to get a repsonse he can poke at. But, when he is faced with some actual facts and serious views about life in the response, he cowers away and avoids all contact.
I gave this guy a tad of my attention, believing that he might have some serious views on things... boy was I wrong. Don't let this guy pull a fast one on you - don't read his column (and possibly any other columns). He is, simply put, a jackass not worth paying attention to.
The one problem with this type of site... (Score:2, Interesting)
*growl*
-Sara
Re:Weird timing... (Score:2, Interesting)
This story mentions airdropping of leaflets, and I know they were doing a lot of that in Afghanistan itself.
So my question is:
Who the hell is going to clean up this mess?!?!
If *I* were to suddenly drop thousands of pieces of paper over a US city, I'd be picked up and fined HEAVILY for littering. Why the hell is it ok for the US to litter over other countries?
Despite being a US citizen, I think it's high time NATO or the UN [or whoever] gets around to fining the US for this littering of our planet! And for the many other stupid-ass things this country keeps doing.
Then again, that's just my opinion...I could be wrong [apologies to Denis Miller]
Ender
Re:Weird timing... (Score:2, Interesting)
PsyOps on the enemies is routine, but since our policies our so fucking sick we need to PsyOp our allies and friends too so that they won't object.
In my (small, quite harmless European) country, our foreign minister got a nastygram from the US embassy telling him that the USA is displeased with him. He hasn't given enough support for the US "War on Terrorism".
Hey, fuck you guys! You're becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union!
Daily Howler, too! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Marty... (Score:2, Interesting)
Even worse:
Yes, this was another piece of J. Katz drivel, but he went out of his way to misrepresent matters even more that usual. Either that, or he just failed to research his material.
Our friend marty has his own website [martybeckerman.com], where one can read about the piece Katz mentioned. As for Marty's books, Marty was not published by some established press; he created his own "label" and "self-published". This is one step above claiming that I've published many articles because I've posted to slashdot [slashdot.org] and have my own website.[1]
Nice job, Job. Keep up that high-quality journalism for which we've all grown to love you.
-SK
[1] I do have respect for authors who choose to self-publish and share their work with the world. I'm working on a similar project of my own, but it would have been much more reponsible for Katz to say something like "Marty's self-published volume 'xxx' (Infected Press, 2000)".
A "vast, alternative subculture?" (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the "information" being disseminated on disinfo.com, it sounds pretty useless to me. The X-Men, Space Mutation, The Matrix, Real Jesus, Radiohead? How does this qualify as an alternative culture? It's just the standard, blank-stare, low-IQ pop culture that the USA, and increasingly other parts of the world, are already swamped with. We need less of this tripe, not more.
Also, I'd like to point out that the net can itself be a source of disinformation, particularly if you are trying to do scientific research. The net is full of bullshit scientific claims, proofs, and experiments, to the point where it is much more productive to just go to the library and get the information from the best source: peer-reviewed journals. The net has a long way to come until it's truly a source of unbiased, variegated, and correct information.
Once again, Jon Katz takes aim and misses...
agreeing as well (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm gonna get an Offtopic for this, but as Gir would say, "I love this show."
Re:AIM also (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't see how AIM is any more "wacko" than FAIR; if AIM believes there is a lot of corruption going on in government, for instance, they are hardly alone in their belief, and they do cite their evidence to back it up. AIM on the other hand tends to lambast "inaccuracy" in media when it really is talking about differences of opinion or politics, not inaccuracy. Just because one does not toe the leftist party line on a particular subject doesn't mean one's facts are wrong.
As to chronology, I think it was FAIR which was the left's answer to AIM, not the other way around. Although my memory could be faulty here.
Re:...Pascal? gimme a break. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's my big problem with it, really; of course, logical deduction regarding faith coming from a Jansenist (anti-rationalist cult of the 17th century and thereabouts, to those of you who don't know) is ironic to the point of being funny...
/Brian
Disinformation does not play nice with others (Score:2, Interesting)
I have fairly personal expereience with the owners of this site as, at one time, ran a entertainment & news magazine ( of the dead tree variety ) called, oddly enough Disinformation Magazine here in Vancouver, Canada. We also ran a related website under the domain we registered, www.disinfo.org. We started up Jan 25, '99. the following Febuary, The Disinformation Company ( parent of dismagazine.com ) served us with a cease and desist order for the use of www.disinfo.org and the name Disinformation magazine. Upon doing some research and getting legal advice we found that we the trademark for which we were being hastled was only applied for in Canada, not granted. and only a month before we recived a cease and desist order. Since we had been publishing for a significant amount of time before the trademark was appied for, we could beat the order under with proof of prior use. It is under Canadian common law. But, since we were cash strapped, we came to a very one sided arangement with our tormenters. Disinformation payed us 500 US for our domain and after significant hasstles and delays, paid for the registration of www.dismagazine.com
We have since moved on to other, non profit things, but are pretty weary of these guys.