News and views

I'm fascinated by this article - which I could find no hint of in the mainstream media - and by the "Asia Times" itself.

I think it presents one of those challenges we have discussed a little about how to evaluate material on the Internet. Asia Times is an "internet only" publication and its articles seem well documented.

My question is - is it a publication with a single point of view and if it is, who finances it? (If you click on the "about us" link on their home page you learn some answers. They are financed, they say, by their advertising. )

This particular article grows out of a News Conference held October 16 by the Cato Institute. (see press release. ). More on the Cato Institute can be found here.

If you go to the Cato Institute you will find out they are essentially a libertarian think tank. Now I hasten to add, be wary of all labels. The quesiton is, are they making sense? They have a fascinating , brief dicussion of labels - what to call themselves - in their "about us" page found here.

I guess what gets me about all this, is that we seem to be going through an era in which the two traditional labels - "liberal" and "conservative" are increasingly meaningless. I'm thinking now of the "neocons" and the "progressives" and the way Democrats and Republicans seemed to have switched sides on a number of traditional issues, such as isolationism. But it isn't really isolationism. is it? Maybe it's neo-isolationism?

Any way - perhaps what all this means is that the combination of 9/11 and the ease of promulgating ideas on the Internet have really blown a hole in traditional political/social thinking networks?

Whew . . . and in any event, can anyone find this story reported in any of the mainstream news media? The story about this new group? And what does the lack of this reporting tell us about the mainstream media/ Or about this story? Or both?

So far this article was picked up by several internet sources - common dreams, antiwar.com, & Hi Pakistan.

Gripe?? -It seems as though following all your news articles and their subsequent internet links is a full time-and-a-half job with little time left for pondering the ramifications of what is being reported.