The Internet Gives Media Mites a Place to Shout
By Danny Schechter

WELCOME to the Internet backlash, fueled by the irrationality of our global economic system, which bases investment decisions on self-styled “market psychology” in which perceptions trump reality Explains Business Week: “With U.S. news just a click away on the Internet and TV sets around the world endlessly tuned to CNN and CNBC, pessimism in one country can crop up elsewhere in a way that was never possible before. The New Economy is built on global trade, global capital markets and global communications. Unfortunately, the door swings both ways: Links which propelled growth in the boom may help spread the slump today.” Don’t blame the Internet. The messenger (or in this case, the mechanism) is not responsible for the message. The Internet is here to stay, and while many commercial interests who wanted a modern gold rush were trapped by their own greed, hype and phony projections, there is another Internet story going largely untold.

And that is: The way the Web has become a platform for not-for-profit educational and political forums, exchanges and political organizing. Thousands of groups, causes and concerns have created an on-line presence for themselves in ways they never could do through off-line mainstream media. Their diversity of opinions, dissenting perspectives and issues that tend to be sanitized and marginalized in mass media coverage now have an outlet-and sometimes even a global audience.

If you surf the Net or plug into the countless free E-mail list services, you will be deluged with all manner of content including petitions, tirades and, alas, conspiracy mongerers. Taken together, it can be a valuable and worthwhile resource once you learn how to sort through the inundation of raw data. A medium conceived and funded by the Pentagon has become an unparalleled center for activism and a vital source for community even if some view it only as a cesspool of sex, subversion and even sedition. Millions now make choices-for good and bad.

A recent Nielsen//NetRatings study of Americans’ online habits found that search engines, portals and online communities are attracting the greatest number of Internet users. According to the study, an estimated 95 million Americans surfed such sites in the month of May. It reported, “People are using the Internet at home on average of 32 times a month, visiting 21 unique sites, viewing 1109 pages per month and viewing 35 pages per session.” Sounds good, but critics still worry, because increasingly fewer big companies, such as AOL Time Warner followed by Yahoo and Microsoft, control the largest bases of online customers. And there’s this paradox: Despite globalization, global news coverage is shrinking. Only two news sources, the Associated Press and Reuters, offer 90 percent of the news of the world on the top 50 most heavily utilized news sites. This monopolization points to homogenization and an Anglo-American news orientation-and on a “worldwide web” no less. There are other perspectives but you often need to be a bonafide webmaster to find them.

The good news is that despite all the mergers on high, independent companies at the bottom of the media food chain are coming up with easy to access new sites and ventures drawing on fast online technologies. These developments include bold news syndication services and critical media sites where disaffected journalists can sound off, and critics can offer unfiltered analysis of what’s missing in our media diets.

Finding sustainable financing is often the biggest challenge these sites face-but many have gone non-profit and depend on donors of all kinds. They may not generate big profits but they may do better long-term than so many of the high-ticket ventures that have fizzled.

For consumers of online information, this economic reality ultimately means that if you want to find diverse views and have a say, you may need to pay, backing independent media to keep the Web feisty and free.

Danny Schechter, editor of Globalvision’s MediaChannel.org, is the author of “News Dissector” and other books.