I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

I am struggling with the media bias I see in indy media right now. Most of us with the ability to think critically have long recognized that mainstream media seems to be missing the ball on some things. The lopsided campaign  coverage, the refusal to criticize the Bush administration (until very recently), the "All Terror, All the Time' feel of coverage on CNN and FOX...it just seems non-representative of reality for the most part.

But Indy media was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be open, informed, and objective. It was supposed to tell the non-corporate commandeered story.

And guess what? Indy outlets are also loaded up with bias. Just masquerading a bit differently, it appears.

This past week, I have been listening to NPR, particularly two shows in the morning, Uprising, and Democracy Now. Both are excellent shows that feature independent thinking and digests of mainstream and alternative media news stories. I don't really watch CNN, MSNBC, or read the local paper anymore because the coverage is so crappy. One would think the only things of interest happening in the world are in that little region South of Canada and North of Mexico, and maybe occaisionally something in the UK, Iraq, or a tsunami gets some interest. You'd think nothing else was going on in the world, as though everyone outside of the US was on auto-pilot and living happily in whatever lesser lives they might have available.

 I follow more of the Indie outlets.

But lately, especially on NPR, I have started to pick out the select messages that underlie an agenda being beamed here. I guess I am fortunate enough to catch the cues as they are lobbed over the airwaves, but I wonder if others are.

Couple of examples. This morning, Uprising interviews a doctor in the charity hospital in New Orleans. The facts are that Tulane and other 'white' hospitals were evacuated first, and then that this hospital only just began its evacuations, but staff only. Not patients, who, it is implied, are mostly black and poor. They'll be evacuated last. The interviewer has smugly laid out her case. Nonwhites are treated poorly.

The doctor responds that actually, outside the charity hospital walls, there are several recognizable news media persons on the street, interviewing passers by, standing on dry ground, with a 'situation normal' sort of look and feel.

Inside the hospital, however, the situation is broadcast as dire, and they anxiously await evacuation.

Which is the reality? Is it situation normal, or dire? The doctor himself was a little unsure and found the contrasting views a little unsettling.

The interviewer from Uprising then pressed on about an offer from Cuba, well experienced in hurricanes, to send 11,000 doctors, with supplies to the US. Of course Dubya refused, and isn't this awful? Why didn't we take the aid, why couldn't they have helped us?

The doctor was again befuddled. He thought that the refusal was well done because it was really a publicity play on the part of Cuba, rather than a meaningful attempt to help or build bridges. He felt if it could have been given in the first days, it might have been good, but that we had plenty of people and supplies to handle the problem. It wasn't a matter of a shortage of doctors.

It was a matter of a shortage of leadership, and of confusion. Throwing more people, even with the best of intentions, into the confusion, wouldn't have helped at all. What New Orleans really needed was organization to deploy the help and resources that arrived.

The interviewer seemed almost sad to have let go of the tempting nibble of an attack on the government for refusing aid to poor indigent people.

Refugees, I believe the media is now calling them. The mainstream "if it bleeds it leads" media, that is.

Refugees? These people are US citizens. They perhaps should live in a less risky place, as should we Californians. They should perhaps have tried to get out. Those without jobs, credit cards, or cars to leave should perhaps have tried to make arrangements to stay elsewhere, or approach the city (which wouldn't have responded, I think) about an evacuation plan.

This was absent in the interview. In fact, the attitude seems to be, as indicated by the "Black Commentator" a radio show also on NPR, who read a spurious essay on the right of return, that everyone in New Orleans is underclass, underdog, and unaccountable for their hand in what happened.

Now, I am about as liberal as they get, but I can also think for myself here, and I think the view I got on NPR was, well, a little one-sided. I think the view on the mainstream press, is, well, a little one-sided (albeit the pro-government side) as well.

What's needed in the media (corporate and indy) is a little less of the kind of grass-roots activism that keeps up the we-they battle. We have enough division, thanks. We have enough anger. We have enough disparity. We have enough blame for 'otherness' to last us a lifetime.

What we need is some organization. We need some unity. We need some togetherness. We need some helping one another to make things better. We need images like that to show our kids because they are already getting too much "me first' training. I don't mean hokey 'good news' kind of shows. I mean images that show a nation working shoulder to shoulder to fix a mess. I mean people helping one another - people who'd never meet if it weren't for this kind of disaster. I mean hero stories in compassion and courage. I mean the Humane Society workers wading through ponds to retrieve abandoned pets and reunite them with frantic owners who were told they couldn't bring them to shelters. I mean stories about what it takes to come together under something like this.

Where's the media outlet for that kind of coverage/?

I'd watch that channel.