Help defend your news from corporate media The single most unpleasant part of any fund drive is the
inevitable (and ceaseless) begging. The editorial collective here at
AGR dislikes addressing such pleas to you, our readers, every bit as
much as much you probably dislike reading them. There’s a similar
dynamic at work when folks with money get panhandled by those without
as they walk down the street. No one looks forward to demeaning themselves,
and no one else wants to watch them do it. But the reality is that our survival depends on you, and
this fall finds us critically low on funds. A local community of volunteers gathers our news, proofreads,
lays the paper out, gets it to the printer, and distributes it. It takes
the editorial collective about 80 hours a week to do its work. Newsgathering
needs about 30 hours. A good 20 hours are spent on our weekly compilations.
Proofreading requires about 15 hours. The bits and pieces left over
– website maintenance and updating, layout, preparing news briefs,
etc. – add up to perhaps 15 hours. That’s 160 hours of work, or 8 hours less than the
total number of hours, night and day, in a week. The mere human labor
involved, were we to pay these volunteers a living wage for it, would
cost us almost $100,000 dollars a year. And then there’s rent,
printing costs, electric and phone bills. . . The fact is that without a supportive community, without
the people who feel strongly enough about the paper that they sacrifice
significant amounts of their lives to it, the Asheville Global Report
would collapse. We believe that this kind of generosity keeps the paper
focused on its original mission -- to keep ordinary people informed
about the forces that affect their lives, and to do this in the face
of a mainstream media whose current purpose seems wholly at odds with
ours: to keep us un- or dis-informed. If our costs were high, the effort
to meet them would inevitably change our ethic. That’s the danger for any organization working for
social change. The need to perpetuate itself can, at any time, begin
outweighing its original mission. Many organizations (it wouldn’t
be nice to name them) have suffered this fate and experienced a quiet
moral coup. In fact, just such a coup has overthrown the original
objective of mainstream media to serve as a critical voice for the people.
In this profit-driven age, Disney now owns ABC; General Electric owns
NBC; and Viacom owns CBS. And via “interlocking directorates”
-- whereby the director of one company may sit on the board of another
company -- GE/NBC shares its directors with Coca Cola, Chase Manhattan,
Kellogg, Texaco, and a host of others, as do all our top media. (See
http://www.fair.org/media-woes/interlocking-directorates.html.) NBC,
to all extents and purposes, is Coke. ABC is Boeing. Fox is Phillip
Morris. The New York Times is Hallmark. We, on the other hand, are relative nobodies. Three of
the editors wash dishes for a living. A fourth is a carpenter. The fifth
is a part-time clerk. This isn’t a complaint; we find our fulfillment
in efforts like the Asheville Global Report. We don’t need seven
or eight billion dollars to our names, like Rupert Murdoch, to do a
good job (or whatever he thinks he needs it for). This is the fundamental difference between independent
and corporate media: The modern corporation wants to grow, and grow,
until it owns everything it can, until boundaries blur and Knight-Ridder
begins looking eerily like Raytheon. We just want to survive. If we can increase our distribution,
that’s fine; the more people can inform themselves, the better
it is for all of us. But AGR will never be Coke. We will always work
hard -- without trying to enrich ourselves or anyone else -- to help
lay bare imbalances in power so that you can work effectively to make
things right. We rely solely on ordinary people to help us get by. We
don’t carry ads from chain stores. We aren’t financed by banks
or investments. We don’t take money from any organization whose
scale exceeds what an ordinary person is capable of reaching by honest
work. So we find ourselves entering another fall season without
much to go on. Two weeks ago we had barely enough to last one more month.
We’re still at a dangerously low point. Every organization also committed to social justice survives
much as we do; money during a fund drive comes mostly in small sums,
occasionally in larger ones, from individuals like you who recognize
an echo of their own voices in ours, and who satisfy, in our pages,
their hunger for truth. If you believe in what we’re doing, then send what you can. There’s no pie-in-the-sky ending for us, and the world won’t look a whole lot better next week, or next year, because of our collective efforts. We, and you, will still be struggling. But it’s a crucial struggle, and it’s good to be in it together. Yours,
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