Subject: Let’s make some news

Dear Weekly Spin reader,

It’s time to reinvent journalism, and you can help. Contribute now: https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118

We need to hear from 250 Weekly Spin readers – will you be one?

For more than a decade, John Stauber and I have been exposing the ways that professional spin doctors manipulate the media and undermine democracy. As part of our work at the Center for Media and Democracy, we’ve written books like “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry,” and “Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq.”

Now we want to do more than complain about the problem, and we need your help.

Two years ago, we launched a website that we called “Disinfopedia” – an experiment in media democracy and citizen investigative journalism. It has since grown into a leading resource on the players who work behind the scenes to shape public opinion and public policy. Its mission has also expanded, and to reflect that, we have just renamed it “SourceWatch.”

Help us build this encyclopedia of people, groups and issues shaping the public agenda by donating today, at: https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118

SourceWatch (www.sourcewatch.org) is an example of media democracy in action – an information source that is truly “of, by and for the people” who use it. It has become a tool that journalists, activists and people like you are using to research and report on key issues such as media concentration and reform, democratic revitalization, environmental health and sustainability, the war in Iraq, corporate manipulation of government agencies, and the power and influence of right-wing special interest groups and lobbies.

I’d like you to do two things, right now. They’ll only take a few minutes.

(1) Do a Google search (at www.google.com) for “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” “Ahmed Chalabi” or the “Cooler Heads Coalition” — some of the front groups and paid pundits that have polluted our information environment. In each case you’ll find that the very first page of search results includes a SourceWatch/Disinfopedia article. Read the article, and judge for yourself what kind of job SourceWatch is doing at debunking and exposing hidden agendas.

(2) Send us a contribution to keep this work growing. You can donate right now to the Center for Media and Democracy, using this secure, on-line form: https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118

SourceWatch is only the beginning. Over the course of the next two years, we plan to build collaborative relationships with public interest activists, journalists, academics and people like yourself. We’ll work to restore ethics and transparency to journalism, by developing and promoting ethical standards for online investigative journalism. We’re also developing software and other tools to help more people (such as you, perhaps) set up their own independent online news websites.

Of course, this all costs money. As our work has grown in popularity, so have our costs. Our staff, once was just John and myself, now consists of six people. Other costs have grown as well, like our web hosting service, which now costs more than eight times what we were paying just a year ago. As a matter of principle, we do not accept industry or government funding that might compromise our independence. Instead, we depend for support on people like you.

We need 250 people like you to step up and support our citizen journalism initiative. Please take a minute to donate to the Center for Media and Democracy today:

https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118

Thank you!

Sincerely, Sheldon Rampton Research Director, Center for Media and Democracy

P.S. If you give $35 or more, we’ll give you a year’s subscription to our award-winning quarterly journal, PR Watch. If you give $100 or more, we will send you your choice of one of the books that John and I have written, signed by both of us. Or, if you prefer, we’ll send you a copy “The Problem of the Media,” the latest book by media scholar Robert McChesney, a good friend and supporter of our work.

P.P.S. If you prefer to donate by check (made out to “CMD”), our mailing address is: CMD, 520 University Avenue, Suite 227, Madison, WI 53703.

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