The Ithaca Community News (ICN) is a non-profit news service bringing alternative news and views from Ithaca, NY to readers all over the world. ICN is also a weekly email newsletter with more than 8,000 subscribers.

Paul Glover founded ICN in 2000 and published it for five years before handing the reins to Elizabeth Field, a freelance journalist, in November, 2005.

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Editorial: All the News that's Fit to Print? All of it?

January 4, 2006
by Elizabeth Bauchner

On New Year’s Eve, the Ithaca Journal’s headline story was this: “Probe to find U.S. spying leak begins.” It was basically about how the Bush administration is trying to find (and punish) the official who leaked the story that the U.S. government is illegally spying on U.S. citizens. The article was presented as though the leaking of this information was what’s wrong with the picture.

Where was the headline about how the Department of Defense is monitoring U.S. citizens without proper court approval or oversight? Or the headline about how the FBI admitted it had “more information than it should have” on ordinary citizens and how its database has a group of Quakers listed as a threat to National Security? I looked as far back as December 24 to see if there was a Journal headline describing how the New York Times sat on its story on domestic spying for a year, but no, I couldn’t find it in the Journal, at least not on the front page. Then, low and behold, on January 2 the headline read: “Bush says U.S. Spying is Necessary.”

Is this the kind of news we want to see headlined in our daily newspapers? A week, two weeks after a story breaks that puts the Bush Administration into another tight squeeze, the Journal runs a story spinning the Bush side?
 
Let’s face it: The Journal, like most newspapers, will cater to its advertisers and top corporate executives. Sure, we get headlines about the County Legislature, Common Council, and ICSD, and I appreciate those, but just as often with national news we get the side of big business and government. We don’t often hear local voices writing about national news. And the stories of the people are reserved only for the opinion page. All newspapers have a business section; none have a labor section. 
 
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been pondering ICN and where I want to take it in 2006. It seems to me that its greatest asset is local, community news, and the people in Ithaca who make it happen. But it also serves another purpose, and that’s to bring a local voice to issues of national and international concern that our “local” news doesn’t touch, like the domestic spying headlines we were denied in the Journal’s pages. ICN is local news, local events, and local community activism, and it is a local response to what the heck is happening out there that we really ought to know about.
 
So, my goal for 2006 is to bring you, ICN readers, more local news reports and a questioning voice about the other news that is (or isn’t) reported. My goal is to keep ICN the way it is, but to add more. The community events and listings will stay, the Ithaca War and Peace report will stay, Labor News, Sustainability, it will all stay. What I will add to it are articles on the web site written by and about the local alternative community. I will provide news about us funky and quirky Ithacans that you simply can’t get anywhere else.
 
If this sounds more like the kind of news you want to see, please consider making a donation to ICN so that I can devote the necessary time to do this work, and to cover basic startup expenses like retooling the web site to make it more accessible to readers. Donations are tax-deductible if written to Social Ventures, Inc. and can be sent to ICN, P.O. Box 874, Ithaca, NY. 14851.
 
Thanks, and have a great New Year!

Elizabeth Bauchner, Editor, ICN


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