Want to be "among the most informed people on the planet when it comes to political matters"???

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The why of it

Our philosophy here at RRND isn't complicated. We don't concern ourselves with self-serving claims of "objectivity." We're libertarians and proud of it. Many of our commentary links are also to libertarian or pro-freedom articles; the rest are to "other sources" that we think libertarians will, or at least should, find interesting for one reason or another. And we feel free to editorialize by adding notes or crafting our own headlines in the news section.

We're libertarians, and our product is intended for a libertarian audience. That's that.

However biased we may be, though, we _do_ believe that the proper function of a publication like ours is to keep you informed, and we do our best to achieve that. Tonight, I came across a perfect example of why we need to do what we're doing.

The top news story in this edition of RRND is "US Army admits to killing Iraqi child." The source I chose for that story is Al-Jazeera, the much-maligned, but actually rather fair-minded, Arab news network headquartered in Qatar.

We run some stories from non-US sources, even though our audience is mostly (I estimate in excess of 90%) American. One advantage of foreign sources is that most of them wear their politics on their sleeves, like we do. The Guardian (for example), for example, is an unabashedly leftist publication. So is the New York Times (for example). The Guardian doesn't claim to be anything but an unabashedly leftist publication. The Times likes to pretend, outside the confines of its editorial pages, to be dispassionate and non-partisan in its coverage of news.

We know better, of course ... but the pretense distorts the coverage. The Guardian will be selective in the facts it cites and to hell with anyone who doesn't like it, but you _know_ that there's an angle to the story. The Times will subtly distort its "factual" stories to get the same result, while touting its non-existent neutrality.

But I digress. Why, you ask, would I pick Al-Jazeera as the source for the day's top news story? Why not a good old reliable American source like the Washington Post or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution?

The answer: Because the American press isn't covering the story. The only account I found on any nominally American source was Yahoo!'s mirror of an AFP (a French bureau) story.

Let me make this clear: The Australian press is covering the story. The Indian press is covering the story. The Malaysian press is covering the story. The Lebanese press is covering the story. Singapore, Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa, Canada, Oman ... papers in all of these countries are covering the story.

But the American press? Not one word, if Google searches on several keywords is any indication. I didn't find accounts on the sites of CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any other American newspaper. I didn't find an Associated Press brief. I didn't find a Reuters story. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

When the war in Iraq began, I laid down an editorial line for RRND: Combat deaths in Iraq will be our top story whenever we know about them. Not because "if it bleeds, it leads" -- we're not a newsstand publication that needs a big headline to attract a buyer -- but because the war is the top story of the day until it ends, and the dying is, or should be, the top story of the war. It's the essential fact of conflict. People die. And the people paying for the conflict should know about its effects. Not just US combat deaths, either. Last time I looked, we all bled red. Whether the war is right or wrong, those who fall beneath the sword are equally dead, and we've decided that we have an obligation to keep those deaths in our readers' minds until this thing is over.

So color me offended. The armed forces of the United States kill a 9-year-old boy (a killing which I'm prone to believe was, indeed, accidental, but which leaves said boy no less dead), then try to buy his family off for $2500 ... and the free press of a great nation ignores it.

This is a particularly egregious example of the American press's silence on important stories, but it's not the only one by a damn sight. I'm sure we don't catch all of those suppressed stories ... but we try. And we'll keep trying.

That's what we're here for. I like to think that RRND's readers are among the most informed people on the planet when it comes to political matters. I also like to think that RRND is partially responsible for keeping them so informed.

I'll wrap this up, of course, with the customary "send money" note. If what I say above makes sense to you, I hope that it also explains why it's important for RRND to survive and thrive. I still have two copies of Ilana Mercer's _Broad Sides_ to give away to our next two $100 donors (see yesterday's issue for instructions), and our premium page still abounds with cool swag for donors who don't care to throw _that_ much cash our way. Here's the URL:

http://www.rationalreview.com/news/premiums.html

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review