The Voice is gone... another chink in the footings of Lady Liberty is chipped away

"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon."
--Thomas Paine

On September 11, 2001,
I quit watching corporate television news and started reading the Village Voice.
Frankly, pathos was becoming bathos in the MSM.
I was becoming better at filtering, or detecting spin. Propaganda. Fool the eye, shell games, misdirection. Straw men and Potemkin villages. Press secretaries and pundits from think tanks.
I was the only one at lunch the next day who didn't say, "why do these 'others' hate us?"
And what better newspaper to shine a light on what 9-11 meant to the actual man on the street of New York City, than the Voice?

This morning's loud groan of pain caused by NPR reporting has to do with their coverage of the take-over of one of last liberal newspapers in America, the Village Voice, by conservative Arizona corporate interests, who have already demonstrated their intentions by the firing of one of my favorite RELIABLE journalists, James Ridgeway.

Go back and read archives of Ridgeway and Nat Hentoff if you can.
If you had read their work, unlike any other reporting in the U.S., you wouldn't have believed in the WMD lies, or been in favor of invading Iraq, either.

You might have chosen, as I did, on the onset of invasion, to turn away from the deadly fireworks show of Shock and Awe, and perhaps tune in to a live webcam of an Iraqi street, to witness, to understand there were actual families under those five hundred pound bombs.

The Voice has been tainted, it will no longer be a voice I will trust. I have no doubt that it will be trivialized and commercialized. Good luck to Mr. Ridgeway, he will have faithful readers wherever he ends up.

The American experiment was all about checks and balances: the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, and the fourth estate, the press. When one party owns them all, it is not democracy. The American experiment is on life support, ready to be turned off.

Another journalist who was silenced but who refuses to go quietly: Bill Moyers...