Uncompromising

Is no news better than compromised news? I think so. If you're getting compromised news, you'll accept it as good news. If you're not getting any news, you'll go look for yourself.

Al Giordano has closed down Narco News - maybe permanently - because he didn't have the funds to provide a "safety net" for his journalists who got into dangerous situations covering the news. In his closing statement, he offers these pearls:

Many good people have written us since, insisting that there must be a way to bring back Narco News. Logically, that makes sense. Our reality, however, does not always adhere to linear logic. Power knows how to squash like bugs those that practice its definition of linearity. Powerful forces have long worked, both openly and behind the scenes, to silence us. The most powerful of them has no human face: It’s the market and the tyranny whose name is economy. Perhaps, in the future, we will, against the odds, find the path to start again, just as the people of Bolivia found a path – a crack in the system – to defeat that same powerful enemy this last week.

...It’s super hard to map a victorious plan: The landscape is littered with a thousand projects that started out with worthy goals but that quickly bored the public. To be asking for money with one hand, while trying to report the news with the other, ends up making people tailor their work to those who have money and, sadly, to abandon and to betray the majority that does not. One starts trying to “placate the King by speaking the King’s English.” The story of people who started out strong but lost their edge, and therefore could not WIN, repeats itself in every field. Losing our edge would be a form of defeat that we could never accept.

And from Luis Gomez, co-producer:

I would like to have a grandchild who, on any given morning, comes to visit me with some printouts in hand and asks, “Did you write this?” And from my memories I will tell her that we lifted up a war machine against the troops of the Empire… That it seemed important to us to inform, to give the people the tools to understand the dirty maneuvers that cost too many lives in our América, all because of a poorly titled “War on Drugs.”

In a way, I see these guys as playing roles in humankind's movie of struggle and resistance. That movie just plays on and on - and I wonder when it ends.

Maybe never. For maybe it's the story of birth.