The Frankfurter School

I’m not sure of the exact moment when I decided to start a blog.  It fell somewhere between the twentieth and thirtieth time that I had a conversation with a friend, colleague or acquaintance about an issue of the day, and I would cite a news story and they would invariably respond, “Where did you read that?”

I am a politics and news junkie and I have been all of my life.  I have always voraciously consumed newspapers, magazines and CNN, and shared and discussed my opinions with friends and family. 

I started getting sick of CNN around the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  I just couldn’t stomach the round-the-clock coverage of the most salacious details of a sex scandal at the expense of nearly everything else that was going on in the world.  Apparently the United States was bombing Afghanistan at the time in an attempt to hit Osama Bin Laden, but this was only mentioned on Crossfire as in connection with the movie “Wag the Dog.” 

However, it wasn’t until the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that I began to truly resent the news reporting on pretty much every channel, newspaper or magazine.  I was no expert on the subject, but the idea that Saddam Hussein posed a grave and immediate threat to our nation seemed absurd to me.  I was naturally suspicious of the convenient timing of the articles on the front page of the New York Times declaring that Saddam was actively buying materials to manufacture nuclear weapons.  So I started searching for other news sources, hoping to find ones I could truly trust.

Thus began my quest to find out what was really going on in the world, to try to understand world events from a broader perspective, and to understand American domestic and foreign policy with fact and analysis that didn’t seem heavily invested in the outcome of my opinion. 

I turned to the BBC, thinking that just getting out of the US might add the needed perspective.  But that turned out to be just as unsatisfying as US outlets.  The Guardian was slightly more enlightening but didn’t quite cover the territory I wanted to read about on a regular basis.  I found a website called Common Dreams, to which I remain a loyal reader to this day, which curated articles from news wires and daily papers, as well as editorials, opinion pieces, and press releases from civil rights, civil liberties environmental and peace organizations.  But it still didn’t give me the same satisfaction that I got from sitting down with my beloved New York Times.  

I came to learn that I could no longer rely on one source of information, one clearinghouse that I could trust.  And I started to see great differences between media outlets owned by corporations and independently supported organizations.  Despite the reputations and slogans, no one newspaper comes close to “all the news that’s fit to print,” no broadcast outlet is truly a “trusted name in news,” and obviously nothing I see on TV is remotely “fair and balanced.”  Balance, in the rules of corporate news organizations, has become about transcribing the talking points of both major political parties.  Journalists have largely abandoned their fealty to fact and rational analysis, lest they come off as unpatriotic or anger their powerful sources.  And if one or both political parties doesn’t believe that something is important enough to talk about, then it is not newsworthy.  Truth itself suddenly has an ideology, and if it gets reported at all, it is given equal weight to lies, all in the name of balance.

I have now put together a collection of different news and information sources, and I have had to develop and hone critical reading and thinking skills in order to arrive at a sense of what really may be going on in the world.  I share with you on this blog (in a section to the right) where I am getting most of my information, and I will try to impart some of the thinking that goes along with deciphering and decoding these stories.  I am grateful and completely indebted to those journalists and thinkers who have brought ideas to me and clarified my thinking.  I will credit them everywhere I can and recommend their books.

I welcome your comments.  The point of this blog is not only to enlighten, but to raise the level of public discourse.  Please help me by participating in it.