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The motto of the Laissez Faire City Times is:
"All the News that Others see
fit to Trample"
Monopoly media corporations and entrenched political elites are
understandably not pleased with the Internet. When the Internet
disseminates information that threatens their stranglehold on the
presentation and interpretation of current events and history, they take
refuge in charging it with rumour-mongering--as well as other nasty
practices for which they themselves feel secret guilt.
For
everyone else the Internet has become the technological super equivalent
of Samizdat journalism. Its free flow of information resembles
the underground network in the latter days of the Soviet Empire, where
the effective use of the fax machine and the VCR helped bring to light
the incredible corruption of Soviet politicians. These simple
technologies allowed freedom-loving people to communicate with each
other and to bring to light the facts suppressed in official versions of
the "truth" (Pravda).
In the mid-1970s, Ernst Haas, an expert on
transnational institutions, asked the rhetorical question: "How can
the government of Bolivia control the flow of information when every
peasant now has a transistor radio and can tune into BBC?" Today's
media moguls, who see themselves as an essential part of the ruling
class, scream about the Internet with much the same relevance as the
government of Bolivia discussed the "transistor radio crisis" in the
1970s.
But in the U.S., the stakes are higher. To maintain
authority, any duplicitous and elitist empire requires an
establishment media to influence public sentiment and cover-up the
falsehoods which invariably multiply when a corrupt system reaches its
zenith and begins to lose control and unwind.
The political
corruption incipient in the U.S. - the "last remaining super-power on
earth", which steadfastly refuses to reform, is almost as deeply rooted,
but far more obfuscated and sophisticated than that of its former Soviet
counterpart. And the lies and evil schemes employed to conceal its
crimes, and thereby continue its usurpation of power, are no less
despicable.
The Internet poses a major threat to both the corrupt
politicians and their long-since compromised handmaidens: the
establishment media.
The latter feel threatened because the
Net is quickly proving to be a rapid alternative sifter and disseminator
of news and therefore public sentiment. Their very livelihoods are at
stake. "Defenders of the conventional media proclaim there is a
public need for 'gatekeepers' who, upholding what they claim are the
high standards of the profession of journalism, seek to weed out the
chaff of rumor and misinformation." They claim to deliver the less
informed reader from the burden of discerning truth from fiction.
We say this is self-serving balderdash!
Our mission is to
hasten the demise, so justly deserved, of elite prudes and opportunists
who have increasingly prostituted their so-called "journalistic
professionalism" to the dictates of special interests and power cliques
with unwholesome hidden agendas in their attempts to influence public
sentiment.
The interactive forum of the Laissez Faire City Times
permits each reader to be not only his own reporter but also his own
gatekeeper.
"Newspapers and magazines only present the
illusion of a democratic forum with their letters to the editor section,
as anyone who has ever tried to take issue with their reporting of, say,
the murder of Vince Foster knows only too well, and anyone who has spent
time on the Internet has become aware that a lot of what gets weeded out
is not chaff at all but is in fact the purest of freedom-nourishing
grain. Even radio talk show hosts can and do readily cut off people
imparting un-approved information, and the ownership of radio stations
like that of newspapers and television networks is nearing total
concentration into the hands of fewer and fewer all-powerful corporate
conglomerates."
At the City Times, the editors and
contributors each have a public name, or at least anonymous pen name,
whereby the reader has instant access by e-mail or the
interactive forum for the purpose of criticism or vetting of the
truth.
Even before the authors have a chance to respond in
defense of their postings, the challenges posed by readers have already
become a matter of public record for all to see and evaluate.
Credibility at the City Times is "at a greater premium than it is
with the local monopoly newspaper or the evening network news because of
the mind-boggling choices that the consumer of Internet information has.
He simply hasn't the time to read the works of someone he does not trust
implicitly."
"Unfounded rumors don't get spread far
because anyone who gets a name for irresponsible, unsupportable rumor
spreading loses his credibility and will not be read"
Each
person thus becomes his or her own gatekeeper at the City Times.
"In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything.
With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it,nothing can
succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper
than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions." --Abraham
Lincoln
(The above quotations were taken
from, or inspired by,David Martin's important essay
"America's Dreyfus Affair".)
Thank you for reading and we hope you come again and again.
The Publisher
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