Pie Palace

There was a great segment on CBC’s The Current about Project Censored. Project Censored is a project run out of the University of Sonomo that monitors news stories carried in the media, tracking what gets covered in mainstream US corporate media; and reports on the stories that aren’t getting covered in the mainstream press. CBC’s story was hung on the Top 25 Censored Stories of this year (which they confusingly call the 2006 list). The stories are clearly focused on the US, but they are still worth reading.

Our society needs more third-party observers like these folks. Mainstream news outlets just seem to focus on a handfull of stories at a time (lessee, in Canada, that would currently be: the election; the Boxing Day shooting in Toronto; and year-end roundups); while our “independent media” just seems shrill, poorly researched, and biased.

One of my many, many wishes is that Project Censored “Real News” page had an RSS feed.

One of the problems with being involved in the Green Party is that we’re chronically understaffed. We don’t have the oodles of volunteers that other parties do, so, as a GP volunteer, my first instinct is to do things by myself. So, when I was forwarded a link to the Tyee’s article by Murray Dobbin that trashes the Green Party and says that we’re nothing more than minions of the Conservative Party sent to spread discord amongst the Chosen (ie, the NDP), my first instinct was to start penning a response.

Then I found a fantastic response from a fellow Green. It hits Dobbin’s article point by point, stating the factual errors that Dobbin bases his argument upon, and shreds it.

This leaves me wondering how to get a job as a misinformant. I can make up stuff about people. How about this? George Bush had his spleen replaced with a nuclear nano-bomb, that will blow up the day before the next US election and be blamed on Islamists. Or Stephen Hawking is actually a robot sent from the future to warp and pervert human understanding of physics, deluding us into believing that the world is round, so that evil time travelling space aliens will be able to conquer us in the year 2032. Those are both pretty good, and I think I did at least as much research as Dobbin to come up with them.