The best way to study issues found in these sites is to compare these alternative treatments with those found in the mainstream media (such as the Chicago Tribune, to take a very standard and important example, which I'll use as the typical example in what follows.)  While some isolated facts and interpretations seen in these sites may also show up in media like the Trib, consistent comparison reveals that the most crucial assumptions, interpretations, and analysis are rarely seriously explored by the Trib.  It only takes a few such comparisons on important issues to realize that there is something very wrong with the "objective journalism" supposedly practiced by the U.S. mainstream media. (Foreign mainstream media are often somewhat more objective and honest about portraying alternate views of U.S. issues than our own mainstream media are, although this is relative, and likely to become rarer.)

        The problem, of course, is that most mainstream media organizations (in most "Western" countries, at least) are major business corporations, increasingly merged and conglomerated, and owned by a small elite group of extremely wealthy people, whose owners' financial interests in maintaining current (capitalist) social and political systems would be harmed if more people had a real understanding of our world.  So only a relatively small amount of alternate views and facts filter through to the public--just enough "opposing views" to convince people that the mainstream media are presenting "both sides"--or are actually "too liberal", a laughably absurd claim that demonstrates just how bad things are in the media.  In fact, the mainstream media consistently omit, distort, and "spin" news and analysis in ways that confuse most people into thinking that there are no reasonable alternatives to the (conservative) status-quo policies that are supported by media like the Trib.  Most journalists, who do tend on average to be (personally) very slightly liberal, and, more importantly, editors--who decide what gets published, and tend to be more conservative the more authority they have--are not going to let many disturbing, alternative views get through, or they will find their work simply not making the final cut for what gets published.   Editors who let more than a small amount of clashing views slip by will be told by their corporate managers that they (or the journalists whose work they're publishing) are being too "biased", and that the "people" aren't interested in all those confusing facts and "fringe" views.  This claim will have some partial truth, too, since alternative views can at first cause perplexity and disgust among people who are used to seeing only simplistic reassurances and platitudes.  Such people might understandably rather read about sports or fashion or comics. 

        One of the most subtle yet effective ways to bias news coverage is to make implied but crucial assumptions in the discussions presented, and omit alternatives to those assumptions.  The Vietnam War is a classic case--discussions within the mainstream media tend to present only two somewhat opposing views--this "opposition" convinces people that "both sides" are being "objectively" presented.  But a 3rd, much more radical alternative assumption is almost never offered--one which, if more people were given the chance to investigate it and perhaps verify it, would radically shift the terms of the debate into areas that wealthy corporate elites do not want to pursue.  One of these two "opposing" views normally presented is that the Vietnam War was from start to finish a noble effort to do the right thing for the Vietnamese people and to promote democracy, which we should have pursued to the bitter end, rather than withdrawing in 1974 without victory.  The other, "opposing" normal view is that the war was initially a noble undertaking to help the Vietnamese people, but a naive one, and that unavoidable "mistakes" were made by the U.S. due to our overeagerness and failure to understand Vietnamese society and culture, leading to a "tragic" but unintended set of circumstances in which we inadvertently harmed them so much that we lost their support for our continued war on the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, and had to withdraw.  This view is reflected in the Orwellian phrase from the time, that occasionally "we had to destroy the village in order to save it"--perhaps a mistake, but at least we did (nobly) want to "save" it; we just got carried away and kind of "accidentally" destroyed it..

        So the two normal views are A):  that we always did our best, or B): that we tried to do our best at first but tragically made some mistakes along the way that should have been avoided.  But there is a 3rd view, virtually unpublished in mainstream media (except to dismiss it instantly as crazy and treasonous), which is nevertheless the view (as polls show) held by more regular Americans than either of the other two views, and which is in my opinion clearly true and supported by massive evidence:  that the 15-year destruction of South Asia, and the genocidal killing of 2 million people there, predominantly civilian peasants, was from the beginning a deliberate and fundamentally immoral policy of the U.S. government, in which the "welfare" of the Vietnamese civilians, and democracy, were not only ignored, but constantly opposed and feared.  Evidence that might bear on this is often cited by mainstream media, but only if it can also be used to support one of the first two "normal" assumptions above, which are the only two ways in which it will be considered.  If it only supports the the third assumption, such evidence is virtually never mentioned.

        For example, CIA reports from the time clearly indicated that if free, democratic elections were held, the Viet Cong (rather than the brutally corrupt South Vietnamese government that the U.S. supported) would certainly win--yet the U.S. consistently helped the South Vietnamese government suppress such free, democratic elections.  Since this evidence can't be used to support either of the two "normal" assumptions, which claim we wanted free democracy for South Vietnam, it is usually omitted.  In contrast, we dropped more bomb tonnage on South Asia than in all of World War II, along with 14 million pounds of Napalm and countless other chemical weapons.  But  this evidence could support either of the two "normal" views ("it was right to use all that weaponry to fight our ruthless enemy", or "we shouldn't have used so much weaponry but it was an honest, if overzealous, mistake") as well as the 3rd one ("the general peasantry supported the Viet Cong because the VC did in fact have the peasants' interests at heart, rather than those of the corrupt government and wealthy business elite supported by the U.S., so the U.S. deliberately destroyed the general peasant society of Vietnam").  Therefore, even though such evidence of massive, genocidal warfare does support the 3rd thesis more than the first two, this evidence isn't always omitted.  But when it isn't omitted, it is simply used to try to decide which of the first two "normal" (and "only possible") assumptions is actually correct.  Though massive documentary evidence, particularly the Pentagon Papers, supports the 3rd view, one will almost never see it considered as even a remote possibility in the mainstream media.  But by reading the alternative sources above, you will see, in discussions of Vietnam, this 3rd possible assumption often treated as a real possibility, so that you can decide for yourself if the evidence supports one assumption more than another. 

[Political Insert--click on it if you want to read it, otherwise skip it--it's down at the bottom anyway.]

        Even dissenting writers who consistently criticize standard views know they should tone down such criticism if they want to be chosen as the "token" opposition figure published in a paper like the Tribune, and tend to write less critically than they do when they get published in the alternative press.  But there is a reasonable alternative understanding of the world--and most people who read the alternative press regularly are thoroughly convinced by the evidence for it.  It is, however, a "radical" view, in the correct and useful sense of the word--meaning to analyze and change the "roots" of problems, rather than just ineffectually treating the distracting, superficial, and often confusing surface symptoms and appearances caused by such deeply-rooted problems.

        How does one know that the information presented in the alternative media isn't similarly biased and distorted?  First, the progressive alternative media (I won't address conservative alternate media, since the mainstream media are already quite conservative in function and effect) usually admit their bias up front, rather than pretending to be "objective".  Their discussions then tend to include many more ways of checking and verifying sources and crucial information, to demonstrate why they hold that bias, and why they believe it is correct.  Note that being biased towards a view doesn't mean it's incorrect--I'm biased towards the view that the Earth is round, not flat, but that happens to be correct.  But I'm prepared to show others evidence as to why the view I'm biased towards is correct.  The alternative media try to provide the reader with sufficient information, sources, and interpretation (all of which can and should be checked and analyzed by the reader, which is precisely what the alternatives encourage) to make up the reader's own mind about whether the "bias" is correct or not.

        The mainstream media, however, don't state their "bias"--they pretend they are "merely" objective, and that they merely happen to objectively arrive at "conservative" views because...well, just because those must be objectively correct, too!  (They also don't label their views as "conservative", but rather as just "common sense" or "centrist".)   The mainstream media are able, however, under the guise of this claimed "objectivity", to omit and trivialize most serious examination of the contrary evidence that is found in the alternative sources, since "every one knows" that "objective" mainstream media would never leave out anything truly important!  It takes only a couple comparisons of issues between alternative sources and the Trib to see which one is omitting crucial and disconfirming information--most of everything the Trib says will show up in the alternative sources, although with a more complex interpretation, and often re-examined to see how many of the facts claimed (if any!) are really true.  But little of what the alternatives say will be addressed by the Trib, and when it is it will often be dismissed with childishly simplistic cliches and with no examination of the sources of the facts involved.

        Secondly, some alternative sources may indeed, of course, distort on occasion--they are not perfect, and sometimes have political agendas that, while usually better, in my opinion, than the mainstream ones, can lead to their claiming greater validity for some approaches than I think are warranted by the evidence.  But that is why one must read more than one alternative source, and read widely enough overall to evaluate controversial issues about which even progressive sources disagree.  The sources above are chosen to provide sufficiently wide and diverse views for most people to get a relatively full range of opinions and facts upon which to exercise their own critical judgment.

         While the online versions above don't always include everything that the (modestly priced) print versions do, they are, cumulatively, quite comprehensive and should lead to a far deeper and more accurate understanding of current events--and for free.  If you have some extra money, of course, these magazines (in their print versions) are all well worth supporting for their moderate subscription prices, as these auxiliary online resources are dependent on the overall income of the enterprises.
     End of Note. 

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Political Insert from above:        

     [Of course, believing the 3rd assumption about Vietnam requires believing that U.S. leaders often behave in a morally monstrous fashion, an incredible proposition to many people.  But this is only incredible because of the mainstream media's suppression of the massive documentary evidence that supports this view, and its refusal to ever remotely consider bringing such evidence to bear upon the explicit assumption (never seriously considered) that such moral monstrosity is possible here in the U.S.  It's also only incredible if one forgets (or never bothered learning) U.S. history, in which our leaders constantly and eagerly supported massive genocide of Native Americans, slavery, brutally anti-democratic oppression of women and blacks, and repeated invasions of, and aid to the dictators of, helpless foreign countries to support U.S. business profits by crushing labor rights and civil society. 

     Note that we don't have any trouble believing that leaders of every other country on Earth throughout history are perfectly capable of being moral monsters--because our media constantly do show us evidence of that, and are willing to entertain that assumption (which is often true, of course.)  Anyone who looks at all honestly at the evidence with an open mind will rapidly see that all countries that exercise world power, especially including (precisely because it has so much power) the U.S., have been led by people who will cynically sacrifice the welfare of common people, both at home and abroad, to maintain the wealth and power of their country (which mainly means that of themselves and their fellow wealthy cronies).  This is just the way the world has worked (so far).  The notion that the U.S. leadership is fundamentally nobler than that of others is inherently unlikely, unsupported by the facts, and wouldn't even be seriously entertained if it weren't for the constant barrage of mainstream media patriotic blather that we are all subject to here in America.  The antidote to living in this glorious but childish dreamworld of American nobility is to read the alternative media--often depressing, to be sure, but adult, moral citizens must learn to deal with the real world, and to put away their childish delusions.

     The obvious fact that the leadership of all powerful states is exercised mainly in the self-interest of its own rich, powerful rulers says nothing about the fundamental morality or immorality of the general mass of American people, nor that of the general population of other countries.  The evidence is plain that most people in all countries are fundamentally decent and moral, but that the economic/political systems that have historically been created to allocate power to the ruling classes of these countries (including monarchy, feudalism, fascism, authoritarian state-"communism", and, crucially, capitalism) have been systems in which the most cynical, greedy, corrupt, and ruthless people tend to be able to seize and hold power.  The greater the extent to which the political systems involved have been democratic, the more such governments have been "better", as they then do tend to represent the fundamental decency and morality of the masses of people somewhat more than in less democratic systems.  The U.S. political system, while fairly democratic, especially compared to many (but not all) other countries, is still substantially corrupted by the power of wealthy capitalists who influence and "buy" politicians--so the U.S. does tend to behave in many ways better than some other countries, but in many other crucial (and horrifying) ways, just as badly as other countries.  The government behaves reasonably well towards perhaps 60% of its own citizens, namely those who have some reasonable share of the nation's immense wealth (much of which is created by the labor of the other 40%).  The government tends to often behave much worse towards poorer people here, and often extremely badly towards those in other countries, particularly those from which U.S. corporations need cheap labor or natural resources to maintain their profits.  The U.S. economic system as a whole makes a tremendous amount of wealth, but much of that comes at the expense of undercompensated poor people here in the U.S. and, even more so, around the world.  The mainstream U.S. media consistently avoid giving any clear picture of this situation to the mass of American citizens, while consistently urging them to be ignorant and happy with their unfairly small share of the economic pie that they and other poor people around the world create.]   End of political insert.
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