Left Wing

Theta Davis chronicles the rise of the Independent Media Center (IMC) movement, which sprang to life in Seattle, during protests there against the World Trade Organization in the fall of 1999. "After Seattle, IMCs began to pop up around the world, from South Africa to New York City. At current count there are more than 60 centers in 25 different countries. Some, like Seattle and New York, have permanent, physical offices.

"So how come media objectivity is suddenly a bad thing?" asks columnist Michael Kinsley. "Conservative press critics are in another tizzy about objectivity and balance in American journalism. Only this time, their complaint isn't the lack of these fine qualities but that there's way too much of the stuff. ... The traditional conservative media critique is that journalists bend the news in a liberal direction because they're liberals.

A full page ad in the New York Times from the left/liberal Institute for America's Future is headlined "Sacrifice is for Suckers." It condemns corporate war profiteering saying that "in the days after the tragedy of September 11 ... lobbyists for GM, GE, IBM and other leading corporations were quietly approaching their friends in Congress, bearing a wish list with hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts and special favors. ... We must not allow the war profiteers to win permanent tax breaks by exploiting our national emergency..."

MIT Institute Professor Noam Chomsky, an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy, discusses U.S.-Muslim relations and reasons for the tensions between the two.