The future of AGR depends on you

Here’s the story. No bones about it. We’re spent. In more ways than one. If you want to see this newspaper continue, all seriously interested parties should step forward and contribute now. Right now.

Asheville Global Report is a tiny outfit. TINY. For every single week for over four years, a small handful of concerned individuals have donated their personal time to confront what they see as a public information crisis. In that time, appreciative readers and a small pool of subscribers and advertisers MADE that effort entirely possible. AGR ABSOLUTELY depends on public support.

And aside from the occasional, smug satisfaction one gets from doing what they think is a good thing, the personal rewards for AGR staff have been largely limited to humbly receiving individual acts of inspired help, kindness and encouragement.

We’re working people. Specifically, we’re the working poor. In order to meet the demands of publishing a free weekly newspaper, AGR editors typically work less than full-time hours at their paying jobs. Our core staff are: a carpenter, a waitress, two dishwashers, and a freelance journalist. Most of us live paycheck to paycheck. None of us have healthcare.

In the Spring and Autumn seasons, we shamelessly beg the public for money to cover our printing costs. AGR’s non-profit existence is largely reliant on this uncomfortable task. So far, this fundraising season has felt sort of thankless. In the two and a half weeks since the drive began, AGR has received precisely two cash donations from one dedicated and loyal reader. That’s it.

What are we to make of this?

Before we go any further with this question, we’d like to just say that since George W. Bush’s campaign to invade Iraq began, our work got harder. The “average” watermark of corporate media disinformation, propaganda, and outright lies and distortions has noticeably risen. After reviewing a giant sample of almost all available mainstream news articles on Iraq, for example, we can attest to the fact that, as promised by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the outset of this “war on terror,” the US government has deliberately planted and promoted false claims in the news media to “shape public opinion.”

Information warfare is the order of the day and the stakes are especially high right now. The same gang who brought you the US expansionist proxy wars in Central and South America in the 1980s are back in the saddle again, except this time it’s the Middle East, and the situation there, and here, is much different. Much different.

In the name of “national security,” the Bush administration has made judicious use of the state’s apparatus for social control, while decimating social protections and civil liberties. It was a chilling wake-up for some of our editors conducting a workshop at a national underground publishing conference last Summer. We’d polled the forty-plus people in the class and asked how many people there had not heard about the USA PATRIOT ACT. To our shock, half the people raised their hands. Here, it had been about seven months since, among other things, their government had effectively destroyed the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and half this lot of alternative media-seeking Americans hadn’t heard about it. To us, the implications were grave and only reaffirmed what we had known all along: the public needs to KNOW, and surely if they were informed, they’d try to change what’s happening, or at least assume some of the responsibility, if not an understanding culpability for some of it.

It is no accident that the sub-cult of indymedia has flowered alongside the mammoth consolidation of global corporate media power which offers more and more of the same, uniform, homogenized, status-quo, bipartisan, don’t-rock-the-boat, synthetic confections of horseshit. The recognition of independent media as not only a legitimate, but an essential component of organizing for social change is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s all too obvious for us now, though, that far too many people here still don’t understand this or appreciate it.

So realistically, what are we to make of the fact that we can’t meet our readership’s demand for papers and run out of our meager distribution every week, and yet, our material support is dry? Unless people help us now, there will be no more Asheville Global Report. Some of us have been working on it a long time and are feeling tired, along with a frequent sense of despair. It can be a lot to deal with. [And just who were those guys videotaping AGR editors on the street the other day, or the guy who followed another one of us from home?]

To those in our immediate community, consider the alternative:

“Law enforcement and intelligence agencies will have to deliberately fashion a strategy for weeding out those among us who have no idea what patriotism is and why so many have died for life, liberty and justice.”

—May 9, 2002, the final paragraph of an anonymous Asheville Citizen-Times staff editorial.

Glad to see the Gannett corporation’s Asheville branch isn’t squeamish in doing its part not to alienate our community from the national media craze of exploiting fear to advocate for an even more advanced police state in the name of “life, liberty and justice.” Decimating our democratic endowments to save them —now that’s real patriotism.

No it’s not. That’s what is more aptly, historically, categorically referred to as Fascist Nationalism. Enjoy. You can’t say we didn’t try to warn you.

Send your check or money order to:

Asheville Global Report
PO Box 1504
Asheville NC 28802

back to top