To Be Well-Informed You Must Go Online

It's been several months since I've had a newspaper delivered to my door. I cancelled my local paper, The Staten Island Advance, after a particularly nasty op-ed article bashed the Tea Party movement as racist. The New York Sun was the last daily paper I subscribed to with satisfaction and since its demise, others have failed to entice. Yet, as a member of the media, I do my due diligence to stay informed about current events, locally, nationally, and globally by logging onto sites such as lucianne.com.

This site allows me to read newspaper articles from around the world and also access legitimate on-line papers and Web magazines. But that isn't its biggest appeal. Each article posted by registered users can be commented on, and, in some cases, facts can even be refuted. Some of these remarks are frequently hilarious and often times brilliant.

Although the majority of the comments appear to be from conservatives, the articles that are posted may come from the most liberal sources: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and several papers in Great Britain and Australia. Videos of MSNBC's blowhard anchor, Keith Olbermann, are frequently posted although not necessarily in a flattering way.

I've been logging onto this site since 2000 and what I've witnessed since that year's presidential election is a complete absence of journalistic integrity. The mainstream media not only revealed a left-wing bias but sought to manipulate the news to suit its own agenda. A seasoned and formerly respected newsman, Dan Rather, fell prey to his own ambition to discredit President George W. Bush less than two months before his reelection bid. Mr. Rather rashly went ahead on Sept. 8, 2004, reporting on CBS's "60 Minutes Wednesday" that a series of memos critical of Mr. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service record had been discovered in the files of Lt. Bush's former commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian.

The documents were debunked by bloggers who became known during the controversy as "the pajamahadeen," highly intelligent and professional on-line users posting on several forums. In a symbolic exchange, the suits at CBS tried to discredit the upstart bloggers, saying that they worked out of their living rooms in pajamas. The real story was that the grassroots guys were right. The establishment media was wrong.

But it's the 2008 presidential campaign that will go down in history as the most blatant corruption of the Fourth Estate, with most of the mainstream media losing all perspective and going gaga over candidate Barack Obama. While some of their fervor has dimmed because of the catastrophic state of the economy, there are still loyalist press hounds defending this administration.

What's so invaluable about lucianne.com and the others on the Internet is that one can determine what the real news stories are rather than the edited versions that the mainstream press wants us to see. For instance, much reporting was done about the president and his family attending an Episcopal Church service recently. One columnist for the liberal Politico site, Ben Smith, wrote, "President Barack Obama, beset by substantial public doubts about his religion and right-wing suspicions that he is Muslim, took a few steps on Sunday to dispel those image problems: He and his family crossed Lafayette Park to St. John's Episcopal Church, just the third time he has worshipped in public since he became president last year."

Fortunately, what Mr. Smith failed to mention was reported in an electronic newspaper, The Post & Email, which noted that the guest speaker for that day was Dr. Ziad Asali, the founder and president of the American Task Force on Palestine. The topic of Dr. Asali's speech was "Prospects for the Two-State Solution the Middle East, Part I." Why did Mr. Smith leave that tidbit out of his story?

Lucianne.com also carries articles from NewsBusters.org, which is always exposing the hypocrisy of the mainstream media. Recently, I learned from an article by Alana Goodman that "[a] New York Times reporter, who has co-authored several fawning articles on the Ground Zero mosque, previously attended a media training program run by the mosque's organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, according to the group's website."

Well, that explains the fawning, doesn't it?

Would I have ever learned except for my Web surfing how the Department of Justice refuses to charge voting intimidation cases against minority offenders; that the DOJ is racially biased? Will The New York Times cover this breaking story on the front page? Very unlikely.

As long as the lucianne.com posts are from legitimate news sources, entertainment news is readily available and Lindsay Lohan and Lady Gaga fans can peruse the articles on celebs. Be warned, however, that comments may be less than flattering to their stars.

The home page lists "must read" posts of the top news stories. It also carries a few very funny videos that will bring a smile to your face.

I've been a fan of lucianne.com since its beginning and in the past two years I've noticed a predictable pattern in the once top news sources when covering this administration. News critical of the administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress will only appear on right-leaning sites. Those supporting these entities will likely come from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and liberal bloggers.

A Boston Herald article quoted remarks that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) made after touring the Boston Medical Center that were unintentionally funny: "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."

Mr. Kerry was commenting on the recent polls showing the possibility of huge Democrat losses in the upcoming November elections. So basically the senator was saying that we're too stupid to know what's really going on. Who can forget the statement he made at a California college that U.S. students who did not "study hard" and "make an effort to be smart" would "get stuck in Iraq"? I suspect that this elitist senator married to a billionairess has very little in common with the troops he insulted and the voters who can't wait to unseat him in 2014.

No, senator, the reason the Democrats are in trouble is that many voters are ignoring the status quo sources with the liberal stamp of approval and getting their news straight from the World Wide Web. They have discovered Web sites such as Lucianne, Free Republic and all the Breitbart sites.

Lucianne.com has over 50,000 registered users called "Ldotters" and registry is open to all with legitimate e-mail addresses. The site is scrupulously monitored and does not allow objectionable language, unlike the hate-filled Huffington Post. No postings from hate sites are permitted. Generally, lucianne.com gets several million hits a month and has been online 24/7 since 2000 without fail. Because of the success of the Tea Parties, it will soon offer a social networking site for lucianne.com members to actually "talk" to each other, meet up, exchange rally sites and recipes. I can't wait. Power to the people!

I might miss having a newspaper to peruse over my morning cup of coffee but I don't miss being manipulated by pseudo journalists. With the Drudge Report and lucianne.com, I'm not missing a thing.

Alicia Colon resides in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com