Dear C4SS Supporters,
This week, I’ve submitted 7,306 Center op-eds to 2,763 publications around the world, and have so far found six media reprints of our material and one rebuttal piece:
- On March 6, the Nogales, Arizona International published a rebuttal, by Robert E. Kimball, to Kevin Carson’s “Nazi Exceptionism; or, how Godwin’s Law Gets it Backward.”
- Also on March 6, Infoshop News ran Kevin’s “To Vote, or Not to Vote.”
- Yesterday (March 8), my own “Syria: There Are No ‘Good Guys'” appeared on Antiwar.com, as well as in the Baltic Review, the St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph [PDF — page 10], and the Carroll County, Maryland Standard.
- Also yesterday, Darian Worden’s new piece, “To End Dictatorship,” ran in the Baltic Review.
Not a bad week — and we’re only four pickups/citations away from 500!
More than just quantity of pickups, an exciting new trend is starting to emerge.
Last week, Massachusetts’s South Coast Today (which often runs our op-eds) ran a piece on its editorial policy, specifically mentioning the Center as a counterpoint to (and therefore on the same level of perceived “opinion authority”) as the much older and better-funded Ayn Rand Center.
Last week, the Nogales International — a thoroughly “mainstream” newspaper, nearly a century old and part of a media group comprising 28 newspapers — ran a Center op-ed … and followed up this week by giving precious op-ed page space to an extended rebuttal.
The Center is almost two years into serious focus on becoming the anarchist movement’s premier “media center.”
The first task of a media center is, of course, to disseminate its material and see that material published as widely as possible. We’ve now managed that nearly 500 times.
The second task of a media center is to get its material “taken seriously” such that more publications run more of that material, and more readers see it, and new doors into new media fields open up.
More than once, in internal discussions at the Center, I’ve stated that I eventually want to see Center personnel sitting at one of those studio “round robin” tables, arguing over a level playing field and to a television audience, with the usual stable of talking heads representing other ideologies and agendas.
We’re not there yet, but as I see it those two developments I mention above are indicators that we’re moving in the right direction and gaining momentum.
The day is not that far off when we’ll start getting calls from “major media” to provide interviews whenever anarchism pops up in the news cycle.
If we can hit some good line drives in that kind of game, we’ll eventually get invited to bring anarchism into the news cycle as it relates to other issues.
But … we need a little help getting there. The comparison to the Ayn Rand Center is flattering, energizing and hopefully warranted, but it’s also definitely a David and Goliath kind of thing.
To put it bluntly, in 2010 the Ayn Rand Center brought in more than 12 million dollars in contributions. In 2012, the Center for a Stateless Society would like to bring in 30 thousand dollars (or more, so that we can do more, but I’m talking about the bottom line on our current operations). Will you please help us out with that?
Have a great weekend!
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society
