There is a person on IndyMedia beginning a series of articles on Building a Global Grassroots Infrastructure-1, development of the IMC network which promises to be a good exploration of how the Internet is enabling real democratic mass communications. In short, how we can take all the Internet execs’ phony rhetoric about revolution and start making it into a reality.

This week’s This Modern World is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of The O’Reilly Factor Read the rest of Tom Tomorrow Takes on O’Reilly …

Letters in response to Battle of the Celebrity Gender Theorists have injected a note of sanity into Salon.com’s on-going love-fest for the antifeminist media creation, Christina Hoff Sommers. The Hear Hear! Award goes to the following letter:

Well, well, what have we here? Salon participating in the media phenomenon of giving prominence to the female anti-feminist who labels gender-based academic pursuits as frivolous and lacking in scientific rigor. How about equal space for a reply?

— Susan Saylor

Salon, of course, responded to this challenge by not providing equal space. Their top article is an Arts & Entertainment piece about radio and their top article in Life is an article about vasectomies.

I thought that Sites That Women Don’t Want sounded like an exposé of the online pornography empire, but it turns out to be a fairly dead-on analysis of why sites such as Oxygen, iVillage, and Women.com are having financial woes: because women is not a terribly specific target audience. Well, duh. The problem is that women’s media (which was actually overwhelmingly authored and edited by men before the mid-1970s) have been ghettoized in the publishing trade for so long out of the serious magazines, that trying to build web sites based on that same old media model is inevitably going to end up in a fairly hopeless product.

Reading Salon.com News: Who’s afraid of the big bad Horowitz? brings back memories of, well, just a few weeks ago, actually. Since I have myself protested an advertisement in our campus newspaper, it strikes me that many of the people writing on this topic seem to have no idea of what the real issue is here (although those who note that David Horowitz is a self-aggrandizing pig making publicity for himself on the backs of young journalists, are not far off).

This is simply not a free press issue. Horowitz was not being censored by some evil cabal of thuggish p.c. mavens, and if the so-called Human Life Alliance’s pamphlet had not been distributed in The Plainsman, they would not have been censored either. Student newspapers are incapable of denying them a forum for their views, since David Horowitz and the HLA are rather rich national figures, and Horowitz is himself a columnist in Salon. The point of a campus newspaper, however, is not to give a voice to well-positioned outsiders who have enough money to buy their way in. The whole point is to give students an open forum.

This doesn’t mean that all political advertisements from outside sources should be banned, since I recognize that student newspapers do need to make money somehow. However, it is extremely hypocritical for Horowitz to pose as some kind of martyr to censorship. Particularly when he and his colleagues are doing it in the pages of a webzine which reaches literally millions more readers than campus newspapers could ever hope to reach.

If Horowitz and the HLA really want to make their voices heard, they ought to write a damn Letter to the Editor like everyone else, or else take their commercial advertisement where it belongs: a commercial newspaper.