Alternative Media Rankings Surge After bin Laden Assassination Spectacle

Updated: May 9th 
This marks the end of the 7-day period since the announcement of the assassination of Osama bin Laden.  Thank you to all of those who continue to follow alternative media, as well as those who are just tuning in -- Liberty, Love, and Peace Will Prevail. 

Dees Illustration

Activist Post

A story like the assassination of "public enemy #1" is naturally going to drive people toward all news sources.  However, we in the alternative news media have been particularly busy since the announcement late Sunday night, as indicated by Alexa website rankings.

For those of us covering the government and mainstream media lies, distortions, and pure propaganda, it has been nearly overwhelming to attend to every facet of this professional wrestling-style spectacle.  As a result, traffic to alternative news sites has surged dramatically.  This is very encouraging, as it indicates that people are not immediately rushing only to the comfort and security of the official story, which is largely framed by appeals to emotion -- rather, people appear to be hungry for facts.  Given that alternative media generally does not have even a fraction of the budget of corporate media, the ranking increases are doubly satisfying.  We are honored to be included with the true news sources below as a reliable indicator of the search for truth and justice amid the miasma of the current official coverage of the bin Laden Assassination Show being peddled for obviously corporate and political reasons.

Alternative Media Rankings Surge After bin Laden Assassination Spectacle

Dees Illustration

Activist Post

A story like the assassination of "public enemy #1" is naturally going to drive people toward all news sources.  However, we in the alternative news media have been particularly busy since the announcement late Sunday night, as indicated by Alexa website rankings.

For those of us covering the government and mainstream media lies, distortions, and pure propaganda, it has been nearly overwhelming to attend to every facet of this professional wrestling-style spectacle.  As a result, traffic to alternative news sites has surged dramatically.  This is very encouraging, as it indicates that people are not immediately rushing only to the comfort and security of the official story, which is largely framed by appeals to emotion -- rather, people appear to be hungry for facts.  Given that alternative media generally does not have even a fraction of the budget of corporate media, the ranking increases are doubly satisfying.  We are honored to be included with the true news sources below as a reliable indicator of the search for truth and justice amid the miasma of the current official coverage of the bin Laden Assassination Show being peddled for obviously corporate and political reasons.

Report: Internet usage transforming news industry

Dees Illustration

Yahoo/AP

NEW YORK – The rapid growth of smartphones and electronic tablets is making the Internet the destination of choice for consumers looking for news, a report released Monday said.

Local, network and cable television news, newspapers, radio and magazines all lost audience last year, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organization that evaluates and studies the performance of the press. News consumption online increased 17 percent last year from the year before, the project said in its eighth annual State of the News Media survey.

The percentage of people who say they get news online at least three times a week surpassed newspapers for the first time. It was second only to local TV news as the most popular news platform and seems poised to pass that medium, too, project director Tom Rosenstiel said. Local TV news has been the most popular format since the 1960s, when its growth was largely responsible for the death of afternoon newspapers, he said.

"It was a milestone year," he said.

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The First Step to Defeating Tyranny is Solidarity in Alternative Media

Activist Post

Clearly, our socio-economic system is broken, unjust, and unsustainable.  Everyone knows it, yet many still choose to ignore it.  However, because of the great work of alternative news leaders, more and more people are finding a map to the treasure trove of truth.  So, if we collectively recognize that the "system" is heading for a cliff, what will it take to unify the masses for genuine solutions?

Time and time again, there's infighting between alternative news leaders.  Certainly each of these leaders are all valiantly sounding the alarm in their own way -- of which the material covered is approximately 95% agreed upon, or more.  Each source provides a unique bridge to other important information, and all deserve respect for their courage and unyielding efforts to support peace, justice, liberty, and most importantly -- the Truth. Yet, the competitive accusations, labeling, and mudslinging continues to distract from the overall message of freedom.


Surely, most of us come from one side of the false left-right political paradigm, and will probably always have some embedded biases on certain issues. Additionally, many carry fixed religious beliefs, or a preference toward one economic system over another, which naturally leads to disagreement.

Although these are important issues, we can all agree that time is running short; we must put aside our differences and find solidarity, as the agenda rapidly progresses and the control grid closes in on all of us. In other words: respectful debate is constructive; divisive argument is not.

As Mario Savio famously stated in his 1964 Berkley speech, "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!"



We at Activist Post also have been accused of attacking friendlies in pursuit of the truth.  We're all human and there's no way we'll always get everything right -- but this serves to humble us.  Yet, the alternative news is still leaps and bounds ahead of the mainstream media in terms of getting it right, and we should all be collectively proud of that.  We face great challenges in exposing the system for what it is, and it's going to take focusing all of our energy on injustices and solutions -- not each other.  All that each of us can do is speak and post the truth to the best that we can decipher it and hope people focus on the core truths and not petty differences.

In pursuit of solutions it seems to matter very little who is to blame, or who the controllers are. Yet, a large majority of the liberty movement get caught up in this discussion -- ourselves included.  This is simply a distraction from identifying the root problems in our system that the conspiracy itself created.  As Gary Allen wrote in None Dare Call It A Conspiracy:

Some conspiratorialists do indeed overdraw the picture by expanding the conspiracy (from the small clique which it is) to include every local kneejerk liberal activist and government bureaucrat. Or, because of racial or religious bigotry, they will take small fragments of legitimate evidence and expand them into a conclusion that will support their particular prejudice, i.e., the conspiracy is totally "Jewish," "Catholic," or "Masonic". These people do not help to expose the conspiracy, but, sadly play into the hands of those who want the public to believe that all conspiratorialists are screwballs.

The controllers deliberately make it extremely difficult to find clarity within their matrix of countless, mindless distractions. But at the heart of this realization is the very place where we can find our common ground, our compass for solidarity.  The stakes are too great for the alternative media to succumb to the very same divide-and-conquer strategies that we are all striving to expose.  We must begin to set the prime example of what we encourage and expect from the public at large if we can make any claims to having a positive vision for free humanity.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Google Seeks to Weaken 'Content Farming' Websites
Glass Houses in the Liberty Movement
Tyranny's Last Stand: The Tipping Point is Here


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Google Seeks to Weaken Search Engine Ranking of "Content Farming" Websites

Alternative news sites beware, Google is changing their algorithm to reduce your status to a spammer in an attempt to control the flow of information on the Internet.

Eric Blair 
Activist Post

Google has announced that it is fixing flaws in its algorithm that allows search results to be spammed, while also planning to weaken the search-ability of websites referred to as "content farms."  Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti-spam team, writes:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. (my emphasis)

The only clear reference from Google about problems occurring from "content farms" in regards to spamming search results is from China: "Last year Google faced a rash of webspam on Chinese domains in our index. Some spammers were purchasing large amounts of cheap .cn domains and stuffing them with misspellings and porn phrases."  They claim this scheme led to "irrelevant" search results.

Yet, their goal seems to be to weaken what has been referred to as "news aggregating" websites as "one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content." This clearly describes many sites that present alternative news. However, plenty of alternative news sites and blogs have original material which they freely share, in part or in full, purely to support one another in disseminating the truth. This is of key importance to spread information in the absence of government or foundation funding, as enjoyed by much of the mainstream media. It is also a counter to censorship, so that a free market of ideas can flourish where people can investigate facts for themselves, rather than have opinions dictated from a limited number of sources.


According to a recent cheerleading article byTechCrunch, content farms indeed include websites that post any duplicate content word-for-word, "Now, finally, it sounds like they’re going to do more to take on sites that just repurpose content from other sites (hopefully including the countless sites that repost TechCrunch articles verbatim)."

What's odd is that everyone knows that original content already carries far more weight with Google algorithms than re-posted content. Additionally, backlinks from well-ranked relevant sites is also a huge factor in building a strong Google page rank, besides driving traffic to the source. Therefore, it would stand to reason that websites like TechCrunch should be overjoyed when other relevant sites post their content, as long as it is sourced with a hyperlink. Alexa ranks TechCrunch at 305 on the entire Internet, no doubt due to their 36,374 links that Alexa recognizes. Without allowing the sharing of their original content, this level of achievement would be impossible under the current Google algorithm.

For those who understand this concept, if they punish sites that re-post content such as news aggregators that link back to them, the source will surely lose traffic and overall ranking despite being heavy in original content.  Which begs the question, what people have been asking for "stronger action against content farms?"  Because gauging the rise in popularity of alternative media (i.e. news aggregators), it seems that Internet users themselves aren't the ones complaining.

It is obviously the entrenched dinosaur media that despises having to play on a level field, especially as it pertains to truthful reporting and analysis.  Former executive editor of the Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., addressed "old media vs. new media" in a September lecture where he excoriated so-called content farms as “parasites living off journalism produced by others.”  He even claims re-posting of material, even if sourced, is "stealing" as reported by Politico:

'The aggregators fill their websites with news, opinion, features, photographs and video that they continuously collect – some would say steal – from other national and local news sites, along with mostly unpaid postings by bloggers who settle for exposure in lieu of money,' Downie said. 'Though they purport to be a new form of journalism, these aggregators are primarily parasites living off journalism produced by others. They attract audiences by aggregating journalism about special interests and opinions reflecting a predictable point of view on the left or right of the political spectrum, along with titillating gossip and sex. Revealing photos of and stories about entertainment and celebrities account for much of the highly touted web traffic to the Huffington Postsite, for example.'

Downie rightly states that these sites attract an audience seeking a certain point of view, but ignores the fact that mainstream outlets do the same.  Some would argue that the real strength behind news aggregators is the ability to expose the establishment's gross injustices and other inconvenient truths without all the "titillating" distractions.  As the masses become more aware of establishment lies, they are flocking to alternative sites who cut through the BS and present a clear path to the truth.

Google's algorithm changes seem to be yet another tool being used to direct the flow of information away from the alternative media to selected mainstream news sources.  It compounds actions already taken by Google in their involvement in upending net neutrality in favor of mega-media machines; the attempt by Congress to crack down on copyright infringement by blacklisting domain names; and copyright extortionist lawyers suing over wording in links.

It's obvious that the establishment will find a way to punish truth sites, either through technical penalization for re-posting material, reducing access speed, blogging taxes, lawsuits for copyright infringement, or by arbitrarily blacklisting the domain altogether.

At its core, this new Google algorithm seems to punish information sharing in favor of protectionist conglomerates with large writing staffs. We in the alternative media would do well to recognize that these actions being taken by the elite of the media world are just another sign of their weakened state.  Now is the time for the alternative media to seek more writers and more cooperation.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Globalists Can Win Cyber War, But Not Information War
Copyright Extortionist Sues Drudge, Backed by Globalists

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