The Orbis

It is easy to see why watching an hour of The O'Reilly Factor would make a person lose all hope for America's journalistic future. However, with the emergence of hundreds of progressive publications, including Web sites, magazines, and newspapers across the nation, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Publications like The American Prospect, a nationally distributed magazine, Harvard's student-managed monthly magazine PerspectiveandCommonDreams.org, an online host to hundreds of articles and even more links to other progressive sites and blogs, have grown with great momentum and readership in the past few years. And perhaps because of the recent surge of conservatism in the nation's media, the number of progressive publications has increased drastically. The specific themes of these publications range from the fight for social justice in relation to the Christian faith in Prism Magazine to the more politically charged Boston Review. Yet the content of all of these progressive publications is a breath of fresh air when compared to the stagnant, more restricted mainstream media.

Articles like "Poverty, Disease, Environmental Decline Are True Axis of Evil'" (CommonDreams.org) and "Abu Graihb's Forgotten Prisoners" (The American Prospect) don't pop up on cnn.com or the MSN Today alerts. The questions addressed by these publications are issues that mainstream American publications choose to ignore. Progressive publications ask important questions, offer opinions and cover stories that make many Americans uncomfortable.

Unwelcome as they may be, these issues must be discussed in order for citizens to form accurate judgments of the state of our country and the world.

Similarly, both professional and amateur bloggers (writers of web logs) have also stepped up in the past year and have truly been using the internet to their best advantage, as shown in their extensive coverage of both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions as they have never been covered before. Blogs were essential media for interested Americans who couldn't be at the conventions themselves and wanted insight into the events beyond the narrow window of the mainstream television media. Readers of the blogs have had access to first-hand accounts of distant proceedings, like the parties' conventions and October's presidential debates. Readers should keep their spin radars on high alert, as bloggers do have their own agendas and fixed biases. However, reading blogs is still very valuable to those who want to form an informed opinion about people, issues and events.

These publications are quickly becoming more common. If you know the right places to start looking, it is possible to find contrasting views of American current events.

Here are some helpful Web sites: http://www.commondreams.org, http://www.prospect.org, http://www.dissentmagazine.org.

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