If your name's not down, you're not coming in

Internet infamy comes calling when those nice folks at the Center for Media and Democracy add me to the Disinfopedia. "Well-funded and strategic disinformation campaigns mislead and confuse the press and the public and prevent social change. Identifying and exposing the thousands of individuals, corporations and PR firms behind this propaganda has been almost impossible -- until now." In other words, if you disagree with the underlying prejudices of the Center, it's onto the list for you. I'm also still waiting for those generous funds to arrive in payment for my crimes against the environment (subbing a football magazine and living in South Florida, apparently).

Actually there's a world of difference between the way people come to their political beliefs and the version you can cobble together with Google. Even erstwhile US Maoists have gone through a complex path to get where they are today. My old comrade Frank Furedi is a case in point. "My main political project is to do what I can to promote the ideas associated with the enlightenment and to try to give humanism a contemporary and future oriented meaning. In contrast to previous times, one needs to give great consideration to the question of individual subjectivity - the development of a more robust sense of self is the precondition for creating an environment hospitable to radical thought" he says in a recent interview (while finding time to hope for a revival of JT Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy; buy yours here). Yet for the anti-corporate campaigners with different priorities, the only reason for him having an alternative viewpoint is that some corporation has bought and paid for it. Disinfopedia: where 'Moscow Gold'-style allegations are sustained in perpetuity.