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The Return Of The Partisan Press?

The Washington Independent went online a week ago yesterday (the official launch is next month), but don't let the citizen journalism outfit's name fool you. Politically speaking, it is no more "independent" than sister blogs funded by the Center for Independent Media.

The Washington branch, led by high-profile journalists like former washingtonpost.com editor and writer Jefferson Morley and former New York Times editor Allison Silver, joins a rebranded Independent News Network that includes the Colorado Confidential, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger and Minnesota Monitor. The Washington Independent gets funding from the Better World Fund, Arca Foundation, Open Society Institute, Park Foundation, Quixote Foundation, Rockefeller Family Foundation, Sunlight Foundation and Surdna Foundation.

All five publications in the network are independent only in the sense that they involve bloggers who work independently of mainstream media outlets. According to Wikipedia, the center's mission is to fund sites "that report news from a progressive perspective." In other words, the goal is to train an army of liberal bloggers who can infuse their opinions with actual reporting.

"We agree with CIM's vision of citizen-driven journalism serving as a critical principle of our democracy," Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation wrote at SunSpots. "We have a hunch that the new enterprise might just shake up the media establishment."

It's a novel idea whose concept hearkens back to the colonial days of the American press, when journalism was a partisan pursuit. The question now is whether the right, always behind when it comes to political and media innovation on the Internet, will try to organize a similar operation or cede this new media battlefield to the left.

UPDATE: I just read Morley's introductory post more closely, and it includes this commentary: "Independence means freedom from corporate and partisan agendas." The center's mission strikes me as having a partisan edge to it, but in light of Morley's viewpoint on what independence means, I have added a question mark to the headline.

Posted by Danny | 12:41 PM

Comments

WOW! A bunch of lefties giving us "independent" news. What a concept! Call CBS maybe they can use them as an "unbiased" source of future news reporters.

Hacklehead | 12.17.07 05:04 PM

"The question now is whether the right, always behind when it comes to political and media innovation on the Internet, will try to organize a similar operation or cede this new media battlefield to the left."

You mean like Pajamas Media, which has existed for, what, two years now?

rastajenk | 12.17.07 05:41 PM

I'm not sure how this is innovative; isn't it just more political blogs? If it is, then in response to your statement about the right, I must point out that there are many right-wing blogs. If it is not, I don't see what the innovation is.

raptros-v76 | 12.17.07 06:30 PM

Go ahead and peel the question mark from the headline, Mr. Glover. The meaning word "partisan" isn't limited to affiliations with modern big-time political machines like the Democrat Party and Republican Party. "Partisan" also encompasses what our Founding Fathers called "factions" and what today we call "special interest groups."

Soft-core socialists like the gang at the Center for Independent Media and easy-going libertarians at the Cato Institute are certainly partisan even though they may keep themselves at arms length from the Democrat and Republican organizations.

michael i | 12.17.07 06:42 PM

"Independence means freedom from corporate and partisan agendas."

This is just clever parsing. See, progressivism isn't a party. So they're not partisan, just progressive.

In fact, I would bet most of these outlets are selling the viewpoint that Democrats aren't "progressive" enough.

"Corporate agenda" is an interesting choice of words too. One of the main things that differentiates center-left blogs from crazy-left blgos is this weird Chomskyite belief among far-lefties that the "corporate" MSM is constantly covering for Republicans, as though their editors and writers either didn't go 4:1 Democrat or were all simultaneously coerced into viewpoints they didn't agree with. These are the people who still think Dan Rather was fired for telling the truth.

TallDave | 12.17.07 06:51 PM

The question mark, based on their claim? You can do better than that.

Look at who funds them, from the links within your own Wikipedia reference. What's even more laughable, the awards the sites in this group received came from the Society of Professional Journalists - those doing the judging and giving out the awards were also contributing to the sites.

Someone should sue to get the Center for Independent Media's tax exempt status revoked - they are clearly a highly charged group engineering partisan politics on the web.

Fredlam | 12.17.07 08:13 PM

Yeah, right...there is a real shortage of left leaning media these days...

Thanks for the laugh.

Tim | 12.17.07 08:17 PM

What's heavier than lead? The first thing I see at the page is some jumble of words that looks like a book review. What is that doing there? What is this site for? At least with the HuffPost you know immediately what the page you're looking at is for.

As for reporters, let me strongly suggest just recruiting everyone from FDL. That way they know they'll be getting the tiptop of citizen journalism around. They can do even worse than these stories: iowaindependent.com/tag.do?tag=immigration

TLB | 12.17.07 08:43 PM

Comrade,
Do you mean to imply that Pravda is not an independent news source? Surely that is because you are tainted with the slime of reactionary rightism that you don't recognize the fundamental truth in it's reportage.

rix | 12.17.07 09:56 PM

Let it be. It'll be fun to watch as a bunch of professional journalists get intellectually pummeled by citizen journalists on the Right.

newyank | 12.17.07 11:22 PM

Partisan progressive media and the left-wing noise machine has been around for a long time.

The Emerging Progressive Media Network 2006

ProgressiveMedia | 12.18.07 08:27 AM

How nice to see you've noticed us. We actually make a conscious effort to look for stories that we know the corporate, traditional media don't cover; with downsizing of media outlets in our state in particular, there's a lot of news that goes unreported or under-reported.

Sure, we're progressives -- but the team in Michigan, for example, runs the spectrum from socially-liberal-fiscal-conservatives to socially-conservative-fiscal-liberals, most without party affiliation. That means we don't all agree on how a story should be covered, are not in lock-step, and are willing to debate within our own ranks how best to cover a story in order to inform the public.

Commenters here sound very disappointed with the so-called liberal media; why aren't they complaining about and to much larger outlets like that well-known bastion of liberal media owned by Rupert Murdoch, or the well-established one headed by Sumner Redstone, or General Electric's outlet, instead of independently-funded outlets that don't own/operate the vast bulk of publicly-owned airwaves? Haven't you had enough of "missing white girl" stories, seen enough of Britney Spears' belly to last a lifetime, heard enough about steroid-use denials from bulked-out freaks in baseball uniforms? Aren't you looking for real news that affects you personally?

MichiganMessenger | 12.18.07 05:56 PM

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