For as long as I can remember, my Sunday has included a reading of The New York Times.

To many Bard students, and many people around the country, such a statement is anathema to their belief in fair, non-corporate news coverage. Dozens of times since arriving here at Bard I've been pointed in the direction of "independent" media, towards organizations which are not run by corporations and therefore have an unbiased account of the news.

Well, why not try getting my news from the independent media? Let's see what I've been missing. Perhaps the real, unvarnished news will change my outlook.

I arrived at the website IndyMedia.org.

My eyes are first caught by the motto of IndyMedia, which is as follows: "IndyMedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. IndyMedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth."

The first story on the site is about something called the PPP (Plan Puebla Panama), which is a Mexican plan for a transportation corridor extending from Puebla, Mexico, to Panama. This sounds like something I'd like to read more about! The unbiased, unvarnished truth headline? "Mayan K'iche Fight For Their Land & Against PPP."

The main IndyMedia summary describes the struggle of the K'iche people, who have been unjustly thrown off of their land by the Guatemalan government. The corrupt nature of the Guatemalan government is not exactly news to me or anyone who reads traditional media sources. However, in the very first sentence of the article, the words "Plan Puebla Panama" are linked to another site. Since I want to learn more about the PPP, I clicked on it.

I was taken to a story on a website called ACERCA.org. ACERCA stands for "Action for Community and Ecology in the Regions of South America." This group supports the worthy goal of an "international response to the environmental and human rights abuses occurring in the Central American region." The website also makes a pitch for donations.

What a group with such an agenda cannot do is provide unbiased news coverage of such things as the PPP, a plan which clearly needs to be examined. This becomes clear almost immediately:

"When Vincente Fox, in early 2001, announced his comprehensive plan for a major transportation and industrial corridor from Puebla, Mexico all the way to Panama, it immediately drew fire from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Subcommandante Marcos denounced the plan saying, 'The Isthmus is not for sale!' The plan, which calls for vast displacement of native communities, rampant and uncontrolled ecological devastation, and massive industrial development will irrevocably damage this region-rich in culture, biodiversity and natural wealth."

Aside from the fact that the only man quoted is the head of the Zapatista Liberation Army (a group of Mayan Indian rebels based in Southern Mexico), such an opening might be tolerable if the article went on to show the plan's actual effects and how they would displace native communities and uncontrollably damage ecology. Instead, we as readers are left to simply accept this as truth. Nowhere in the article do they even return to these truths, except a brief mention that the plan will involve, geographically, "34 million hectares of virgin timber, spectacular fresh water reserves, 30 million low-wage workers, and the World Bank-created 'Meso-American Biological Corridor,' a much-coveted gold mine of biodiversity." It is not clear what these numbers represent. Are they the resources available in the region the PPP will cover? Are they the resources needed to complete the PPP? The vagueness leads me to suspect the former, which of course, does nothing to prove the actual effect the PPP will have on the region. These are the only statistics in the piece, other than a brief note describing how big and populous the area is.

The labor element of the PPP appears in the following paragraph: "The PPP is clear about its plan to remove rural and indigenous communities from the lands that have sustained them for thousands of years, and to place them in urban slums located adjacent to sweatshop factories." My guess is that this is not how the PPP describes it.

My point here is not that the public interest group ACERCA should be giving an even-handed account of the PPP plan it is trying to stop. My point is that for IndyMedia.org to try and pass this account off as unbiased news is at best disingenuous, and at worst entirely manipulative. I am very interested in learning more about this story, and IndyMedia.org is right to put it at the top of its webpage. The story is compelling, of interest to many, and has clear news value. What this story is not is a news story. It does not tell us how and when the PPP will be moving forward, the events that will lead to the PPP being implemented, or why there is even support for the PPP. It only tells us why we should be opposed to the PPP, and never takes the time to prove its case.

What is even less clear is the corporate synergy inherent in the final sentence of the news story: "Chiapas IndyMedia will be covering an anti-PPP conference at the end of March." How closely the people covering said event and the people creating this event are working is an interesting question, one which I unfortunately do not know the answer to. That said, the so-called corporate media's equivalent to such a sentence would be to end a story on an election battle with a link to only one of the candidates' web pages. It is another small way in which this independent media organization has slanted its news coverage.

Further down the page, there is a story about the U.S. Federal Appeals court ruling which struck down two anti-media merger regulations. However, the Forbes.com article (the only link out of the fourteen with actual information on the decision and the laws which were struck down) goes on to describe the degree to which these regulations were already ignored. The new reality inherent in IndyMedia.org's lead was already a part of the marketplace: "Imagine a 21st Century company town where a single corporation owns several TV and radio stations, the local cable system, major news weeklies and the hometown paper."

The only other news story of the links was to a site called "Alternet.org." Their coverage, by Lakshmi Chaudhry, includes nine paragraphs critical of the decision and one paragraph describing "predictable enthusiasm" on the part of "media moguls." The article said nothing about the actual decision or what changes in the law took place. The article was also two weeks old.

So why was this story second on IndyMedia.org's website? Well, fully half of the story is devoted to a protest being held on March 22 in Washington D.C. This story fails the "important news" test, and seems to be little more than an advertisement for the March 22 FCC protest. As well, the timeliness of the story comes into question, since the decision was handed down on February 20, two weeks ago. The story is then only timely if you consider it to be about the protest on March 22, rather than the two week old court decision. This seems to me another clue into IndyMedia.org's decision making process on news.

The third story on the webpage is probably most clear in its biases. The headline, "More Blood for Oil?" immediately betrays an anti-war slant in its writing. The first link, from the sentence, "The Bush Administration's so-called 'War on Terrorism' has had Iraq in its sights for some time," links to an article written by Professor Geoffrey Kemp of Johns Hopkins University arguing why it is necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The problem? Kemp has NOTHING TO DO with the Bush administration.

That point unproven, the article goes on to describe the boon it would be for "Big Oil," which it quickly notes "is well represented in the Bush White House." Well, that isn't really fair, to say the article describes the boon. It mentions the boon, then mentions how much oil Iraq has. Whereas many people would think that those people selling oil would want less of the product around (to drive up prices), IndyMedia.org seems to want us to believe that "Big Oil" is doing everything possible to get the Bush administration to drive DOWN the price of oil through a military intervention in Iraq which could lead to a friendly government. This is one possible scenario.

The alternative scenario is that the Bush administration views Iraq as a legitimate threat to both support and house terrorists and terrorist activities against the United States. This alternate, crazy view is never mentioned.

I am not someone who views the Bush administration kindly, and my ability to believe that money has influence over the administration's policies could scarcely be greater. However, the IndyMedia.org article does nothing besides prove the point that Iraq has a tremendous amount of oil. Their coverage of international opposition to an expanded war are retreaded articles from major news outlets that I had already read weeks ago. Finally, the article ends with a link to the phrase "alternative solutions to a U.S. invasion are being proposed." This misleading end to the sentence, which begins "As it is, international opposition to sanctions and 'no fly zones' is growing…," leads the reader to believe the alternate solutions are being talked about by many nations. Instead, the link takes us to "Nonviolence.org", and the alternative to invasion is to pursue a diplomatic solution. A proposal for "the return of arms inspectors to Iraq as demanded by the Bush administration and the lifting of economic sanctions after 60 days" is fortified by the proviso "The Iraqis have neither accepted nor rejected this proposal." Ignored in the article is the repeated ignoring by Saddam Hussein of the agreements he has made to allow U.N. inspectors into his country, something he has been doing for several years, and which is ongoing! However, a description of Hussein currently breaking agreements would weaken the author's case. And that is the problem. The author, Hans von Sponeck, is not attempting to present a balanced account of the pros and cons of a U.S. invasion of Iraq. He is writing for "Non Violence Web: Your Source for Peace and Anti-War News." He is not a journalist. He is an issue advocate.

I have never been naive enough to assume that writers for publications I read could write fully without bias. To read critically and recognize bias is extremely important. However, when an article appears in The New York Times, for instance, certain journalistic paradigms are followed. There are two sources for any story. People are quoted directly. Outright opinion has no place in news stories. Occasionally biases are less subtle, but they are the exception, not the rule, in a well-run journalistic news story.

So many people rely on the independent media to be just what it promises-a passionate truth-teller. But to get your news from such an obviously biased source (and only from there) is going to lead to ignorance on issues raised in these articles. By all means, do not accept The New York Times, CNN, or any other news source without examining it carefully. But, as is obvious from a careful examination of IndyMedia.org, blindly accepting the word of the independent media is probably going to lead you even further away from truth. Such bias is not a consequence of an individual reporter's views, but the overarching philosophy of the misnamed IndyMedia.org.

Next week, we'll take a look at IndyMedia's "Newswire", as well as other independent media sources.