LETTERS

Kudos to your magazine on the article on AIDS (November 10).

Thanks—for bringing this information to the general public. I can say that AFAN (Aid for AIDS of Nevada), along with Caminar (social rehabilitation programs) and Golden Rainbow (assistance to people living with HIV/AIDS), have been the best things my partner and I have come in contact with since moving here.

Fabian Mera and Arthur McCoy are TRULY a godsend (along with all their co-workers)! They're sincere, empathetic, knowledgeable and true to their jobs.

Please continue to print articles like this. Knowledge is life-saving!

I'm writing everyone to get the right thing done. Family services is ripping off children and selling them to gays. What is going on is wrong, you cannot give children to gays. Children are now subjected to molestation .... By letting them have our children we are saying we no longer believe in God! Gays are not a normal family setting ... [Editor's note: More diatribe ...]

I've given the world the cure for malaria, clean the waters up; malaria is a fungas in the bloodstream, caused by dirty stagnant water, those scientist should know that ... [Editor's note: More personal bio ... ]

5ccs of meth will break the fever in those kids and then someone might help me fight the system.

Dear Mr. Dickensheets [or Editor],

I read your interview with Wil Hylton with interest. As a member of a local media-reform group that has a Sinclair TV station in its midst, the issues that you and Mr. Hylton discussed directly affect our community. In your interview, you asked if the excesses of Sinclair Broadcast Group may cause some corrective action. It's unlikely that the current crowd in Washington will lift a finger to compel television to better serve "the public interest," but grass-roots action can help.

Our group, Iowans for Better Local Television (www.IBLTV.org) has existed for only two-thirds of a year, but in that time we popped up a website, met with our House representative, and even helped coax the nation's largest media-reform group, Free Press, to host a town- hall meeting here that included FCC representatives. That meeting had an SRO crowd and almost 100 citizens testified to the FCC about our broken media system. IBLTV has also tried to get our Sinclair station to be more responsive and responsible to the community. While they have refused to engage us, that just makes our complaint (to be filed with the FCC) that much clearer.

As former FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson has said (and I paraphrase): If media reform is not your top issue, it should be your second.

In these trying times, these words ring particularly true. Without an active, investigative and independent system of reporters and stations, our country will continue to suffer the ills of a poorly informed electorate. Worse, the one-sided, mean-spirited speech heard on Fox and Sinclair stations will only continue to polarize a nation already in political paralysis. While we commoners are being poorly served by Big Media, the wealthy and connected continue to pull the strings for themselves.

Those who have seen the excellent movie Good Night and Good Luck may reflect on how far our media have fallen since the days depicted in that film. Edward R. Murrow would not stand a chance in today's profit-driven non-news news delivery system. He'd be forced to run a blog.

So my suggestion to your readers is: Get interested, learn the issues, organize and spread the word. This issue is not going away. With enough grass-roots efforts across the country, an interconnected Web will grow and speak loudly to the lobbyist-bought "representatives" in Washington that enough is enough. Perhaps then, reform will reverse the damage that 25 years of deregulation have wrought (more information about the issues is included on our website).

Sincerely,

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