Truthout No Longer A Place To Share The Truth

For those familiar with Truthout.org, you will likely have a mental image of their recognizable format, ... predictable three column layout, and proclivity for progressive and liberal news feeds from other sources. On occasion there was original reporting, most recently when Jason Leopold used Truthout(TO) as the news outlet for his research and writing on the Plame affair in Washington. Specifically, Leopold's research on the crime of her public revelation as a CIA NCO operative led him to believe, and TO to publish, that Karl Rove was charged in a sealed Federal indictment as part of the ongoing investigation of that crime. Many TO Forum regulars defended TO's stand to publish Leopold's article, I among them. The jury is literally still out on this investigation, and whom will be indicted remains unkown and under seal to this day.

This forum will not address that article, nor the substance or lack thereof in the article published on TO. This forum is devoted to a discussion of the support TO and Leopold, ... and TO's Executive Director Marc Ash received in the aftermath of the publishing of Leopold's expose. Moreover it is focused upon Truthout's devotion, or lack thereof, to its readership and contributors.

Truthout had long hosted a public forum for fresh ideas from individual contributors (diaries) and as many websites do, TO also invited, indeed thrived, on replies to both diaries and original articles such as Leopold's, and in response to many other daily news article feeds TO republished from other sources. The exchange was lively, moderated, and voluminous. Some on every side of the political aisle would argue that it was not always "fair", ... but a quick survey of other blogs reveals that it was, in general, respectful.

I say "had", for last Friday Truthout decided, ... or at least acted upon a decision perhaps taken earlier, that the Truthout Forum was no longer a proper business pursuit for that website. A clearer definition of TO's business model, as stated to me by TO's executive director, is that Truthout is a news reporting agency. Other sites provide forums for the exchange of ideas, but TO's purpose is not that, ... it is to report the news.

Perhaps TO's readers and contributors would have been better served to have understood that from the very beginning. I, as I suspect many of TO's devoted readers and contributors, both wrote and read the many threads about TO's news feeds and its original reporting, when there was some. For my part the exchange there in the TO Forum helped me to better grasp the full meaning of the news feeds on TO.

Truthout is not the first website to be confused about its business intentions versus its true role in the new world of internet publishing. But TO stands alone perhaps for its inept timing in removing the Forum at a crucial moment in the runup to the Fall elections. If Truthout does not feel the elections are critical, then they are alone in that belief, ... and stand in stark contradiction to those readers who have flocked to TO over the last several years, and poured out their thoughts on the Forum there.

What TO was thinking in their decision to stifle the exchange of ideas this close to the election will remain unknown to the world, I suspect. The lack of a moderator, or the lack of the intention to host a forum at all, both seem pallid in comparison to the need for an open, clear and free speech forum on every progressive venue to marshal energy and participation in the vote. That TO has opted to abandon its most fervent supporters in Mid October tells us something. What that is to become is perhaps the first topic for forums here, or elsewhere that TO readers go to share thoughts again with one another.

The town meeting which was the Truthout Forum is dead, a place where reflections on the pieces of news we all read could be shared.

I will drink my coffee elsewhere and share my thoughts in other places, for I am intent to do so as part of my being Human and aware. I'll get my news from any sources I might choose in the market, ... but I will always discuss it solely with my many friends. I found many in the TO forum, and will retain at least a few from there. But I can not feel that TO itself was a friend at all, ... just a business, ... run by business types, whose intentions are inscrutable, ... and impersonal. For my part, ... I'd rather spend my leisure time with friends. We have things to do with and for one another, ... and we need a place where that can be accomplished!

Stargazer51