PC Alternative Weeklies

Do you have a PC alternative weekly paper in your area? We do here in Knoxville–it’s called the emMetro Pulse/em and while it can sometimes have some articles of interest to me, I have pretty much given up on reading it. Why? The tone of the paper has gotten steadily more PC over the past few years and I am frequently confronted with insulting and belittling editorials and features that paint suburbanites as bourgeois capitalists, Americans as rubes, and a href=”http://www.metropulse.com/articles/2006/16_05/cover_story.shtml”criminals as just being in the wrong place/a at the wrong time. For example, in a cover feature on Greg Thompson, an African American male who murdered an innocent woman, the emMetro Pulse/em had a cover story entitled “Not Crazy Enough.” br /br /The story reports that Greg Thompson is psychotic but the state says he’s sane enough to execute. I have no issue with the paper discussing the death penalty but in addition to implying that this murderer was in the wrong place at the wrong time, they paint his victim’s innocence as almost the reason that the all-white jury gave him the death penalty. The victim, Brenda Lane, was a newlywed, church secretary, soloist in the church choir and the 1982 Outstanding Woman of Bedford County. Thompson forced Lane at knifepoint from a Wal-mart parking lot to a soybean field where, “on impulse,” he stabbed her with a rusty knife, stole her car and left her to die. The lawmen who found her say they can remember the horror on her face when they found her body. Where in the hell does “wrong place at the wrong time” come into play in that gruesome senario? I guess if you are African American and you kill a white woman with a church going impeccable background, you should be found innocent just based on the bourgeois credentials of your victim.br /br /And if I thought the emMetro Pulse/em was PC, it looks fair and balanced compared to the ema href=”http://criticalmoment.org/issue14/adame”Critical Moment/a/em, an alternative weekly in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On the back of a recent issue that a reader sent me, there is a large stenciled template (done by a href=”http://visualresistance.org/wordpress/about/”this outfit/a) of a href=”http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/13/national/main1121576.shtml”Tookie Williams/a, the four-time murderer on the back page with a caption, “No More Death Penalty” and “No More Prisons.” br /br /Huh, “no more prisons?” What do you propose we do with murderers, thieves, and crooks? or to use language you can understand, what do you propose we do with the CEO’s of Enron, etc.? Send a social worker to their house to help them feel the pain for what they did?” br /br /I could go on with various weeklies and the propaganda they spout (and I accept their right to put such nonsense out there) but I don’t have to like it or read it. Do you have an alternative weekly in your neck of the woods that you read or ignore? Let me know or provide a link in the comment section so we can see what other gems are out there to keep us enlightened on the shortcomings of capitalism, the war, suburban life, our terrible prison systems that entrap murderers and thieves, and American Imperialism.