Fr. Roy Bourgeois addresses the military coup in Honduras

Father Roy Bourgeois spoke yesterday (Sept. 24th) at the Handwerker Gallery on Ithaca College campus. He only had an hour but spoke about a lot of different problems occurring in Latin American countries. The talk was to focus on the military coup taking place in Honduras but he talked about his own cause with the School of the Americas and his excommunication from the church as well. Only when Jeff Cohen asked about the media's part in all this did Fr. Roy cover the difference in coverage by the mainstream and independent media.

Fr. Roy's personal cause against the School of the Americas, consists of a protect every year down in Georgia at Fort Benning. Men from Latin America are sent to Fort Benning to be trained in military combat. Back in their countries, these men have been involved in many brutal killings of innocent people by the military. The men who ran the Democratic president of Honduras out of the county were trained at this school.

The dedication and time Fr. Roy has spent to this cause is moving. His protest has been running for almost 20 years and the changes to close down the school have been small. However, Fr. Roy never gives up even after being excommunicated for advocating for women to be allowed into the priesthood.

News You Can Endow...Is that possible?

The extra reading for this week from the New York Times brought up an interesting solution for newspapers' decline in revenue. The article entitled "News You Can Endow" by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt states that endowing newspapers would help save them from extinction. Swensen and Schmidt defended their argument well and the idea sounds good on paper. Endowed newspapers would mean independent news sources and an end to their financial problems. With reporters indebted to their sources to conitnually get the new story and a lack of investiagtive journalism in today's media, maybe this would allow for a free-thinking, independent media. Also it does sound like it would solve the problem of how newspaper will make money by making them non-profit.

However, who would endow the papers? Swensen and Schmidt compare it to endowing colleges and unverisities. Newspapers though important may not hold the same necessity as an education does for endowers.

Also, Swensen and Schmidt disregard the fact that although the web does contain a lot of false information, it is also a new frontier that newspapers can consider. They did mention that newspapers do not make enough revenue from the Internet but that is because it is a small part of newspapers' outlet. Maybe if they marketed their news differently or used many different types of multimedia, they could be making money.

It would be interesting to see how it would play out if we tried to make newspapers not-fot-profit. Putting this into action though is another thing and would require a lot of change and cooperation from many different people. It probably is not a change we will see in the near future but I think it is something to question and even consider.

This is my first blog ever for Independent Media. Let's hope I can figure this all out. Shouldn't be too difficult...