New resources...

I have added F.A.I.R (acronym for Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) to the blog list as well as including the FAIR website on that listing.  These folks do a good job and I recommend you visit their writing and resources often. In case you missed it, the corporate and big money folks are mounting a sustained and serious attack on the power of labor unions and FAIR has some excellent coverage of it.

I have also added a link to Media Lens, a group located in England that include in their "About Us" section of the website this bit of loveliness:

We accept the Buddhist contention that while greed, hatred and ignorance distort reason; compassion empowers it. Our aim is to increase rational awareness, critical thought and compassion.

Our goal is not at all to attack, insult or anger individual journalists, but to highlight significant examples of systemic media distortion that are the cause of immense suffering. For example: the failure to communicate the true death toll of the war in Iraq; the hypocrisy and destructiveness of media reporting on climate change; the failure to expose the real consequences of corporate psychopathology for modern society, sanity and culture.

I am currently reading Burning All Illusions by David Edwards, one of the contributors/founders of Media Lens and am really enjoying it...especially that he recognizes Erich Fromm as one of the most significant thinkers and writers of the Psychology/Psychoanalytic folks.

Fromm is woefully unknown...especially here in the U.S. and the significance of his writing in furtherance of understanding human behavior can't be overstated. If you haven't read Edwards book, do so...it is well worth your time.

Fromm enjoyed a brief moment of popularity during the 1960's (go figure) but primarily in a superfical way...especially here...mainly because of a little book he wrote titled: The Art of Loving. My own cynical take on the popularity of the book is that Americans likely thought it was a how-to sex manual (it isn't).

If you haven't read Fromm, you have a gap in your fund of information and should remedy it as soon as you can. I would suggest you ground yourself in his thinking by first reading Escape From Freedom and The Sane Society. Those two books will go a long way toward getting you up to speed with apprehending the richness contained in the Edwards book...as well as maybe giving you a new take on the influence of society on your perceptions and thinking.