AGR’s independent voice needs your support

We at the Asheville Global Report are often accused of bias in our newspaper’s content.

It’s a charge to which we plead guilty.

We pride ourselves on providing accurate, timely, and well-researched reporting from sources and on topics often neglected or outright ignored by the mainstream media.

But, the fact is, we do see the world from a biased perspective.

As our mission statement explains, we believe “a free exchange of information is necessary to organize for social change.”

What sorts of changes do we mean?

We feel a restored environment, with clean air and safe drinking water is more important than the profits of massive corporations.

We feel that a society based on mutual aid and respect for human rights is preferable to one arranged around hierarchical privilege and luxury.

And the fact that we have a “Labor” section rather than a “Business” section is no accident.

Yes, we are biased.

Meanwhile, the commercial media and nominally “public” broadcasters dependent upon corporate sponsorship battle for the title of most “objective,” all the while trading in the Newspeak of the corporate elites, a language that simulates debate, but which never challenges the underlying assumptions that maintain disparities of power, suggesting instead that an alliance with money equates an alliance with the “objective” truth.

Sadly, publications offered as radical alternatives are often tied to organizations like the Workers World Party (parent of the antiwar group ANSWER) or the Communist Party USA, organizations whose nostalgia for Stalin and Mao make them undesirable (as well as ineffective) alternatives to the present order.

The quality of their news reporting is, by extension, highly dubious.

(In fact, this unfortunate trend is so pervasive, that we found difficulty handing out AGRs at mass demonstrations and protests, until we began to accompany distribution with the assurance that “It isn’t communist!” whereupon the paper is most often gratefully accepted and examined closely on the spot.)

AGR is tied neither to the myths of the private corporation nor those of aspiring authoritarians.We have no affiliation with any commercial organizations or political parties.

Ours is a truly independent bias.

AGR exists to draw attention to community- based social justice efforts and to educate our readers so that they themselves may work more effectively for justice.

In fact (we have been told) AGR is the only free, weekly, 501(c)3 nonprofit, independent world-news paper published in the US.

Unfortunately, being an independent voice also means being independent of regular funding.

We know that our readers trust the all-volunteer editorial board and staff at AGR to produce a quality newspaper each week, as we have done without interruption for more than four years.

We trust our readers don’t need us to talk down to them about “objectivity” and that our goal of promoting positive social change is one that you share.

We must also trust that you will help us continue to publish by giving as much as you can to our Spring Fund Drive.

Please send us your tax-deductible donation now.

P.O. Box 1504
Asheville, NC 28802

back to top