Arts & Entertainment  June 25, 2004

Geek News: Internet news choices will revolutionize media

The last few weeks have brought home to me how the Internet is beginning to revolutionize the delivery of news…and that many may not like the results.
Why? Because new viewpoints are being brought into America’s homes with the click of a mouse. The Internet is going to make it harder for governments to manipulate the news, and will make the U.S. media more open than it now is. We’ll be hearing stories over the next few years that in the past would have been buried in America, thanks to how news can now flow across borders.
Although recent accusations of torture and war crimes committed by U.S. troops came as a big surprise to most Americans, it was far less of a surprise for people in other countries. Why? Because newspapers and TV stations have been reporting such crimes since the beginning of the war. And not just media in countries one might consider unfriendly, but our allies’ media outlets, too. In fact, some papers in Great Britain have even been running stories about this difference, stories about how American media outlets don’t cover certain important events.
It’s still early days. The real changes in news flow haven’t yet hit home, mainly because most people don’t yet know how easy it is to read the news from overseas. Most have never heard of Google News (news.google.com) or Yahoo News (news.yahoo.com), for instance.
In particular, Google News is amazing, a fount of knowledge from 4,500 news sources around the world. Pick a story and see what everyone has to say about it; you’ll get a totally different view of the world, with stories from Islam Online (UK) to Xinhua (China), Channel News Asia (Singapore), to Qatar’s Al Jazeera (visiting this site may be a real surprise–far from the shrill anti-American screed we’ve been led to believe it to be, it actually seems relatively balanced).
But you don’t have to go so far afield to get a completely different view of the world, news that seems to be hidden from Americans. Read the mainstream British and Australian press, and you’ll read stories about how British generals are refusing to fight alongside American troops (because they feel the U.S. military is too brutal); about British aid workers claiming American snipers are targeting ambulance drivers, a scandal that has not yet hit the U.S. press (the Iraqi health minister recently asked (U.S. administrator) Bremer for an explanation of why troops are shooting ambulances); about innocent Iraqis in Fallujah gunned down as they leave their homes; about British prisoners returned from Guantanamo to the U.K., and released by British police as innocent of any crime … then accusing the U.S. military of various forms of torture and abuse. Whether you can believe these stories or not, the fact that the whole world is hearing these accounts — with the exception of America ? is a story in itself, one that the U.S. press has ignored.
We like to think we have a “free” media in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean the media is beyond manipulation and even self-censorship. Remember that CBS, under pressure from the Pentagon, sat on the Abu Ghraib story and only aired it when it seemed that the story was going to appear elsewhere. And it seems likely that many stories widely reported overseas aren’t reported here because publishers are scared of being labelled as “traitorous” or being accused of not “supporting our troops.”
The Internet can ? perhaps will ? change this. Already, many people are getting most of their news online, and as this trend continues, I believe we’ll see a related trend: People will “shop” for news. No longer will they rely on a single local newspaper. Rather, they’ll get information from a wide range of sources … and not all of them will be domestic. America’s about to undergo a news revolution, an invasion of alternative views and hidden stories.
Of course, there’s another way the Internet is already impacting news coverage. When big stories break, millions of people rush to the computers to find out what’s going on. And many of them are visiting “alternative” American news sources that present very different, often anti-establishment, opinions. Sites such as CounterPunch.com and TheNation.com (the online version of the relatively little known but long-lived left-wing magazine that, back in the 1940s, first broke the story about German concentration camps).

The last few weeks have brought home to me how the Internet is beginning to revolutionize the delivery of news…and that many may not like the results.
Why? Because new viewpoints are being brought into America’s homes with the click of a mouse. The Internet is going to make it harder for governments to manipulate the news, and will make the U.S. media more open than it now is. We’ll be hearing stories over the next few years that in the past would have been buried in America, thanks to how news can now flow across borders.
Although recent…

Christopher Wood
Christopher Wood is editor and publisher of BizWest, a regional business journal covering Boulder, Broomfield, Larimer and Weld counties. Wood co-founded the Northern Colorado Business Report in 1995 and served as publisher of the Boulder County Business Report until the two publications were merged to form BizWest in 2014. From 1990 to 1995, Wood served as reporter and managing editor of the Denver Business Journal. He is a Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. He has won numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association, Society of Professional Journalists and the Alliance of Area Business Publishers.
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