Welcome to Free the Media
Free the Media is a Drupal-based Website with three primary foci:
- To provide a platform, support, and advocacy for people persecuted for committing journalism anywhere in the world. This includes journalists from the mainstream corporate media as well as independents working in any medium.
- To provide tools and visibility to ensure the passage of a robust, comprehensive Federal Shield Law in the US which recognizes the critical role a free press plays in maintaining a free society and the necessary role independent media play and have played historically in ensuring a free press
- To spotlight issues involving Media Reform and the Elephants in the Living Room mainstream media frequently ignores
Free the Media is intended to be more than a source for passive information gathering. It is a tool for collaboration, discussion, planning, and grass roots organization. The Drupal platform bills itself as "Community Plumbing".
Drupal was used effectively for grassroots organizing by the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. That Drupal implementation became the Civic Space project, which in turn spun off Civic Space RM. Free the Media builds upon the ideas behind these implementations if not their custom code base. As this site grows and develops you will discover a set of tools here that empower individuals and groups to advance each of the primary objectives along lines they define themselves. These tools include personal and group blogs, discussion forums, collaborative book projects, news feeds, content syndication, links, wikis, and more.
In order to do more than just look, you'll need to register here
Who is IFStone?
Who is IFStone?
Historically I.F. Stone was a newspaperman who became an early independent journalist through his political newsletter I.F. Stone's Weekly. Since the newsletter consisted primarily of current stories with additional commentary by Stone, it could be argued he was the world's first blogger. IFStone is the editorial voice of Free the Media, not a specific person. Posts by IFSTone are not necessarily the work of a single individual or the same individual from post to post, day to day or week to week. It's necessary for every entry to have a specific author and we've chosen IFStone to be the general editorial voice in homage to his contribution to independent journalism.