AGR fall fund drive needs your help

What you are holding here in your hand is the 300th issue of the Asheville Global Report. It takes roughly 160 volunteered hours each week to produce this paper and over these last three hundred weeks the dedicated staff and editors (past and present) of the AGR have contributed roughly 48,000 hours trying to shed some light on many of the most important and oftentimes obscured topics facing humanity today, subjects largely absent from our social and political dialogue because the media giants feel they may not be in the interest of their bottom lines.

Issues like the state of (or, frankly, the decay of ) the world’s environment are strictly off limits in much of the mainstream news. The underlying causes of war, and clear unbiased facts about the costs of war, human and otherwise, are off limit topics. Examination of the “neo-liberal” economic system, by which the world’s economy operates, is strictly taboo in the mainstream media also. The erosion of civil liberties, the collapse of multilateralism in foreign policy, the privatization of everything collectively held (and who benefits), the economic apartheid that separates humanity, and, perhaps most of all, people’s creative resistance to an increasingly totalitarian world are all almost totally absent from the news. The mega-corporations who control the vast majority of the media simply regurgitate from corporate press releases and administration news conferences their presentation of world events. They present only the information they want you to have when you show up on election day and otherwise mind your own damn business, so they can guide this country, with a jingle and a flash, in whatever direction they find most profitable.

Viacom’s CEO, who owns, among other outlets CBS and MTV, endorsed George W. Bush last week for the Presidency, saying essentially that a second Bush term was better for business.

This situation is a fundamental crisis in democracy and it is this crisis that the staff and editors of the AGR are responding to when we put in long late hours to present our readers with timely hard news about the world we share. Without a solution to a media monopoly, democracy in any real sense will continue to erode, as we have seen it erode in recent years. We feel that AGR is a critical part of that solution and that we will continue to be for much time to come; but our readership, people like you who demand to be informed so you can live striving for justice and liberty, also need to continue to be part of the solution. Please continue to make this publication the light it has been by taking the time to donate to the fall fund drive.

In the past month a wave of repression has been waged against free speech. Two community micro radio stations, 90.9FM KFAR in Knoxville, Tennessee which had been broadcasting for five years, and Free Radio Santa Cruz in California which had been on the air for ten years, were shut down by federal agents. FBI agents also participated in seizing the computers responsible for the Indymedia (IMC) websites in 20 countries. Indymedia has also been recently targeted in Cyprus by the CIA.

At the same time the administration is literally destroying books on political whims. According to the LA Times, the federal Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed for debunking some of the United states more prevelent myths.

It is monitoring libraries in unprecedentedly invasive ways. The vast majority of Internet traffic is traced.

There is nothing short of an information war being waged between the forces of greed and those of truth.

And what is the bottom line for us after 300 issues? The bottom line for us is that this effort continues where others have failed because our readership has constantly been willing to support our efforts. We have strived for excellence, and despite the occasional nagging typo from a 5am crunch session, we have by in large achieved just that. We are the only all-volunteer weekly nonprofit news paper available for free anywhere in the country. We have been awarded accolades for our efforts that rival multi-million dollar organizations like the Nation, the Progressive and Mother Jones, including being awarded 9 Project Censored awards in the past three years, more then any other news organization in the world. We have launched a weekly radio show that broadcasts on two different stations locally, WPVM 103.5 and FRA 107.5 FM.

We could not have achieved any of this without the generous support of our readers and now we need that support again. The level of support we receive during our spring and fall fund drives directly effects the production of this paper: it effects the quantity of original coverage we can provide it determines how many papers we can put out on the street in the coming months, and it determines the ways in which this paper can expand towards meeting our ideals for quality of coverage and production. In short everything about the operation of this paper relies on you to support us now.

It’s difficult sometimes in our busy world to remember that our actions can make a critical difference, but right now you can, by supporting an organization that reflects your values, your concerns, and your hopes.

Sincerely,
Asheville Global Report editorial collective