Independent News, For Real

Jonathan's been going on for some time about Consortium News. I've finally gotten around to giving them a read. I'm always late to the party, what can I say.

I've added their site to my reading list to the left. It's that good. Here's an excerpt from a piece about the conservative stranglehold on US media titled, "Hard Lessons from MoveOn Fiasco":

Simply put: This is what happens when one side of American politics – the Right – spends three decades and many billions of dollars building a sophisticated and powerful media apparatus and the other side – the Left – does next to nothing on media infrastructure.

Yes, it’s true that many Democratic senators behaved spinelessly, but a leading reason for their political cowardice is the Republicans’ extraordinary ability to whip up national frenzies over anything that can be portrayed as an affront to them or their allies.

The Right’s powerful ideological media – stretching from newspapers, magazine and book publishing to talk radio, TV networks and the Internet – is arguably the most intimidating force in modern American politics. There is nothing remotely comparable – in size, reach or funding – on the Left.

The only subjects I don't find getting much treatment at ConsortiumNews are LGBT issues. I got 0 search hits on "LGBT OR GLBT," 2 pages of search results for "gay," and a single search result for the word "lesbian."

To put that in perspective, the news site has:

• >10 pages of search results for the term "Iraq,"
• 10 pages of results for the term "Gonzales,"
• >10 pages of results for the term "CIA,"
• 6 pages of results for the term "alito,"
• and 4 pagers of results for the term "scalia."

Hopefully, the LGBT related searches above will yield more hits over time and render my search term comparison inaccurate.