There isn’t time to write this, which is why I’m tapping it out an hour or so into a return flight to San Francisco from New York, where I’ve just spoken to a group of 150 or so. And a most appreciative group it was. I was astonished to discover, however, that my appearance was “controversial,” in the words of the group’s chairman.
Me? Controversial? Who woulda thought?!
No, there really isn’t time to write this – because so much else is happening. Fallujah. Najaf. A mysterious terrorist attack in Syria – of all places – and the war that supposedly “ended” in “victory” lo those many months ago has begun to escalate out of control.
The horror, too, is escalating – photos of Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners were no sooner on the net, when similar photos of the Brits doing the same thing surfaced less than 24 hours later.
There’s not a minute to spare – not a lotta time – to kick off Antiwar.com’s quarterly pledge week, in which we go to our readers for support and I throw myself on their mercy, when so much else of such high importance is going on.
But, alas, I have no choice.
The word from Eric, our devoted Webmaster and de facto General Manager, on the phone after my New York talk, was emphatically clear: You’ve got to write an appeal by Monday, he told me. With our bank account diminishing like sand in an hourglass, there was no room for argument.
Okay, okay, I sighed. I’ll do it already. So here I am, reminding you of how much you need Antiwar.com – and, of course, since we’re a public non-profit, how much we need you…..
It was Antiwar.com, after all, that exposed the lies of the War Party early on. It’s all the rage to complain, these days, about how the Bush administration lied us into war, but a year ago almost no one was saying that. Back then, they were all citing David Kay (before he announced the nonexistence of Iraqi WMD) – while we were citing Scott Ritter, who told the truth, defending him from the smears of the War Party. As a recent New York Review of Books piece on the “mainstream” media and the war put it: “Now they tell us!”
But we’ve been telling you all along.
That’s why Antiwar.com has gained the kind of hard-won credibility that catapulted us to number 42 in Amazon’s Alexa rating system of news websites – right up there with CNN, the New York Times, and right above Time magazine (chortle chortle!). In the generally reliable Alexa ratings – the Nielsens of the Internet – Antiwar.com is currently beating out Ananova, Aljazeera, Newsday, Time Magazine, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NationalGeographic.com, the Houston Chronicle, and BBC Weather.
Not too bad for a little operation like ours. The reasons for our rise have to do with a simple operating principle: we are pledged to pierce the obscuring “fog of war” and shine the spotlight on the truth.
While most of the rest of the world was saying, well, of course Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, Antiwar.com was debunking the lies.
When they told us the Iraqis were behind 9/11, many Americans believed them – and Antiwar.com worked tirelessly to get out the truth.
As the neoconservative faction embedded in the highest councils of this administration plotted and schemed to drag us into war, Antiwar.com exposed their key role as the sparkplug of the War Party – and the “neocon” meme was spread far and wide. A once-obscure ideological grouping is now famous – or, more accurately, infamous – thanks in large part to our efforts.
And there’s more good news:
As I was writing this I got an email from Eric, proudly informing me of Friday’s stats: a record 63,168 unique visitors. It’s great: we’re breaking through the media blackout on antiwar voices, establishing this website as the place to discover the facts about what is happening in our crazed and dangerous world.
Success is sweet – but it’s also a problem, because we have no editorial staff. None. Zero. Zilch. I am it.
The original material we generate, the news stories we link to, the headlines we write and re-write: all, in theory at least, are reviewed by me. In practice, however, it’s just not possible for one person to do all that and turn out three columns every week. With the war in Iraq heating up, and more material coming at me at higher velocity, it’s even more impossible than usual. Many more eyes are trained on us than ever before, and Antiwar.com now desperately needs something it has never really had: a full-time editor.
Is that really so much to ask for?
After all, the news sites we’re beating out all have huge organizations backing them up, and editors galore. We, on the other hand, have three guys and a number of very hardworking volunteers. It’s David and Goliath, and, so far, the skinny little upstart known as Antiwar.com is knocking them down, one by one, with a slingshot. But we need to put a little heft on our bones, because the fight ahead is not going to be easy.
The chief complaint of those opposed to the war has been the consistently pro-war bias of the “mainstream” media during the run-up to the conflict. American journalism, instead of acting as the guardian of truth, became a transmission belt for the lies of the War Party. The myth of Iraq’s “liberation” was born and disseminated in America’s newsrooms, antiwar opponents bitterly aver – and they’re right, of course. But what’s the alternative? Is there an alternative?
Why, yes, it’s called the “alternative” media – i.e. Antiwar.com.
Since December of 1995, Antiwar.com has raised the banner of peace in cyberspace: through the endless interventions of the Clinton era, coming into some prominence during the Kosovo conflict, we warned over and over of the gathering storm in the Middle East. And, more importantly, we educated our growing number of readers, focusing their attention on the looming threats to peace, and exposing them to information they might not otherwise come across. We went to daily – often hourly – updates during the Kosovo war, and, as you might imagine, the pace of our work picked up quite a bit after 9/11 and hasn’t stopped accelerating since.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve been shot out of a cannon, and, no, it isn’t because of an illegal substance in that cigarette dangling out of my mouth. Scout’s honor….
Being in the Top 50 is a great achievement, but, frankly, I’m worried. Because I’m wondering how long we can keep this up. I know I’m getting a little crispy around the edges, and I’m sure my co-workers are feeling a little singed, too.
After all, I did have that little episode last year: it wasn’t a very big heart attack, but scary enough to slow me down a bit. Take it easy, my doctor told me.
Yeah, suuuure, I thought. Just as soon as I write tomorrow’s column, edit those three articles that have been sitting around for a week, and get around to reviewing the candidates for tonight’s “spotlight” piece.
Sheesh!
We’ve done very well, on very little. What I’m trying to tell you is that, this time, we need a little more.
In order to just go along in the same old way, slowly but surely burning ourselves out, we need to raise at least $40,000 on a quarterly basis. In order to hire a full-time editor, however, we need to up that to at least $50,000.
We’re growing, in terms of readers, and our influence on the public debate. Unfortunately, Antiwar.com’s income has not grown proportionately. While the number of contributions has increased, due to our larger audience, the average amount has decreased.
Look, I’m not going to badger you, or try to shame you into digging deep in your pockets and coming up with the cash we need to compete with the pro-war media. I don’t mind politely asking, however, and even making an impassioned appeal, because I feel, in large part, that we’ve earned it.
We give you the news, and analysis, updated constantly. At any time of the day or night you know you can come to Antiwar.com and find out what’s really going on. How much is that worth to you?
All I’m really asking for is one thing: don’t take us for granted. If you like what we do, support us. This is an election year, and I know we’re competing with a lot of partisan interests: where you put your money is, in an important sense, your vote for the institution you believe is best advancing your own values. This year, however, the competition, at least as far as the two major parties are concerned, seems like a pushover. There is no major party antiwar candidate this year, and whatever support the Democrats garner from the antiwar movement is a purely negative phenomenon, a movement aptly dubbed Anybody But Bush. But your vote for Antiwar.com, in the form of your tax-deductible contribution, is a vote for something positive: for a peaceful noninterventionist foreign policy, for truth-telling in journalism and skepticism in the face of government pronouncements.
It is all fine and dandy to complain about the “mainstream” media, and decry Fox News as the symbol of everything that’s wrong with America these days. The challenge is to build an alternative. Some liberals have belatedly recognized this, and have decided to go into the business of talk radio, contesting the dominance of right-wing talk show hosts – with mixed success. More power to them, but our own strategy is to homestead the previously unclaimed territory known as cyberspace. Over half of all American homes are now hooked up to the Internet, and before long it will be close to 100 percent. We recognized the importance of new media back in 1995, when we first staked out the Antiwar.com domain name, and ran it up the flagpole in the hope that some would salute.
The investment, in time and money, has paid off – far more than we ever imagined. But now our resources are largely exhausted – heck, we’re exhausted – and we need you to come through for us in a big way. Antiwar.com needs to make the final transition from amateurism to a professional news organization. We’ve redesigned the front page, and are well on our way to re-doing the entire site. It looks pretty good, but that’s just a cosmetic change, a visual metaphor for our final advance to full professionalization.
There’s no time for me to go on and on about it, because too much is going on. Today’s column should have been about Iraq: the deepening crisis of the American occupation, and the coalition’s pathetic attempt to paint a happy face on a looming disaster. There is hardly a moment to spare, as I said at the beginning of this piece, for me to exhort my readers to help us in our fight. So I’ll just say this:
We can’t do it without you. So contribute, as much as you can, as soon as you can.
