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In his fact sheet about opednews, Rob Kall wrote:OpEdNews.com is a tough progressive website, supporting values that are really dead center American, like fairness, democracy, justice, protection of our national resources and commons, and preferring to support humans and America before corporations and religions.
But when I looked up the word "progressive" in my dictionary, I was surprised to find this definition:
progressive: adj. receptive to fresh ideas or concepts.
Progressive comes from the word "progress," which means, "moving foward, advancement, development, or improvement."
"Protection of our national resources and commons," is called conservation, and although you wouldn't know it these days, it is closely connected to traditional conservative values.
Fairness, democracy, and justice are certainly traditional American values, but are they really fresh or innovative?
"Preferring to support humans and America before corporations and religions," is a concept that dates back to well before our Declaration of Independence, even if only the latter part is mentioned in the Constitution.
What I'm getting at is that, "supporting values that are really dead center American," is not necessarily being "receptive to fresh ideas or concepts."
There are all sort of progressives, of course. For example, a Progressive Democrat, as far as I can determine, is somebody who will vote for the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, good or bad, right or wrong, and whether or not they support that candidate's agenda. For a Progressive Democrat, being progressive doesn't seem to mean supporting a progressive agenda if the Democratic Party's presidential nominee doesn't have a progressive agenda. So while they may be progressive in other things, when it comes to the presidential race, they are all Democrat and no progressive.
Opednews is tough. It will oppose the Republicans in ways that the Democratic Party itself would never do for fear of appearing partisan. Someday perhaps somebody will explain to me why they exist at all if they aren't partisan, but that's for another diary. But is opednews progressive? In some ways it appears to be, for example, in covering stories that the mainstream media will no longer cover because of its corporate ownership and close ties to government. But in that example it is the mainstream media that regressed, because it used to cover controversial stories and no longer does. Does moving the startling line back mean that you've made progress in a race? When the alternative media tries to pick up the slack left by the desertion of the mainstream media, it is an attempt to keep things the way that they used to be, not an attempt to move forward.
These are difficult times, media-wise. I am grateful to Rob Kall and opednews for allowing me and others to occasionally publish articles that are out of the mainstream. But at a time in U.S. history when both major political parties have consistently been moving backwards towards the unregulated capitalism that led to the Great Depression and the New Deal, it seems to be all that most of us can do is tread water furiously, trying to keep from going under, and that progress is the last thing on our minds.
