A new, yet-to-be-named, local website will be forming next year to fill in the gaps left by regional newspaper shutterings in the Bay Area. The nonprofit site nabbed a hefty donation—$5 million—from San Francisco businessman F. Warren Hellman, and its expertise and manpower will come from “KQED-FM, which has a 28–person news staff, and the 120 students of the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism,” the New York Times reports.

(Thanks, @MotherJones.)

Source: The New York Times

Copyright law? Who cares about copyright law? Just about anyone who downloads media—that is, most of us—should care. “This world in which we outlaw copyright criminals is like the Victorians, who pretended that they didn’t all masturbate,” says writer and copyright activist Cory Doctorow in the film Rip! A Remix Manifesto, a documentary that wears its free-culture position on its sleeve as it explores the current muddled state of copyright law.

Inspired by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and other “copyfighters,” as they’ve been called, the remix manifesto rests on four pillars: 1) culture always builds on the past; 2) the past always tries to control the future; 3) our future is becoming less free; and 4) to build free societies, you must limit control of the past.

To build its case, the film revisits some of the great cultural ripoffs in history, from Walt Disney appropriating ages-old fairy tales for his cartoons to Led Zeppelin riffing off an old blues song to create “Whole Lotta Love.” But Rip’s central sympathetic character is recording artist and DJ Girl Talk, who basically plunders snippets from hundreds of musicians as he builds his cut-and-paste dance-floor mashups. Putting Girl Talk at the center of the film makes for a fun ride. Footage from his mania-inducing shows allows viewers to occasionally blow off some copyrighteous anger, and his music illustrates all the complexities of the copyright debate: It’s both original and derivative, high- and low-brow, rump-shaking and thought-provoking.

True to its mission, Rip! A Remix Manifesto is available for download on a name-your-price basis, and its creator, director Brett Gaylor, has invited people to rip and remix the film. So go ahead: For once, you won’t have to look over your shoulder as you hit “download.”

Source: Rip! A Remix Manifesto

Last winter when we named Tzeporah Berman one of Utne Reader’s 50 Visionaries, we spoke to the Canadian activist about her latest project, PowerUp Canada, which challenges citizens to take the “next step” in addressing climate change—that is, pushing for greener legislation. Private actions, like switching to CFLs, still matter, Berman said, but it’s critical to extend that greenwill to the public level and start changing laws too.

Guess Chevron didn’t get the message. The May-June issue of World Watch contains a biting spoof of the energy company’s “I will” ad campaign, which depicts earnest, average-looking folks alongside statements such as “I will finally get a programmable thermostat.” The spoofs—brought to you by the League of Conservation Voters—pair Chevron execs with their own “I will” statements, such as, “I will think about cleaning up one or two of Chevron’s 94 Superfund toxic waste sites.”

Putting the focus on large-scale regulation doesn’t give individuals a pass on small-scale green choices, of course. The ads, writes World Watch, merely “suggest that the company could also do well to embrace greater corporate responsibility.”

Source: World Watch

Image by philosophygeek, licensed under Creative Commons.

Artist and educator Jer Thorp has done something extraordinary and absurd—he’s wired a smoke alarm to his computer and set it to go off if the New York Times Newswire registers something catastrophic

It’s all because of a nagging feeling we can all relate to: “When I check news websites in the morning,” Thorp writes at his blog, blprnt, “somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspect that the world might have caught on fire while I was asleep.”

Thorp’s news alarm tutorial is almost as delightful as the back and forth in the comment section:

Commenter: While I applaud your ingenuity, I must raise the question as to whether it’s wise to use a smoke alarm as the alert signal. Smoke alarms have a distinctive, fairly-unique alarm sound that has so far been reserved for the event of smoke or fire. Using this sound for another purpose diminishes its capacity to do its intended purpose effectively.

Thorp: This is an art project. Quite frankly, you’d have to be insane to want an 85 dB alarm telling you when news has arrived.

Veteran photojournalist Bruce Haley has seen the worst of us. He's covered conflicts stretching back to the Afghan battle against the Soviet Union. Ten years ago, he wrote something he called The Tao of War Photography. It's part training manual and part memoir. It's mostly tragic and it's a little bit hilarious. Here are some highlights and a few of Haley's photographs (or read The Tao of War Photography in its entirety):

Photo: National Liberation Army guerrilla fighter; Burma

"To begin with, practice this sentence: 'If I get out of here alive, I’ll never do this again.'

"...The editors of the major magazines really don’t give a rat’s ass about the latest war and famine in the hinterlands of East BurkinaTimorLanka. You’ll never get an assignment to cover this unless Leonardo DiCaprio becomes a rebel commander and Tommy Hilfiger designs his battle fatigues.

"...Absent Leo and Tommy, a few murdered white tourists will cause a temporary blip on the radar screen. Or not.

"...It is said that sudden fright causes people to soil themselves. I have noticed that sustained fright causes increased flatulence: fear-farting. I have also seen Afghan mujahideen run out into a heavy rain of incoming artillery rather than shelter in a small crevice with two fear-farting Western journalists.

Photo: Terrified women shelter in a ditch, after being caught out in the open during an artillery barrage; Croatia

"...Do you believe in a personal, loving God who really cares about us mortals down here? Go to a few war zones and famine areas and watch all those innocent children die, then answer this question.

"...On the flipside of #11: many of the people who have actually suffered through such hardships show the greatest faith I’ve ever encountered on the planet. Go figure.

Photo: Guerrilla fighters near the Andaman Sea; Burma

"...Equation: the number of journalists covering any given conflict is directly proportional to the proximity of comfortable lodging and booze.

"...Always keep in mind the following when you photograph people in war zones and other awful places: You’re there because you want to be—they aren’t and you can leave—they can’t."

For more of Haley's fantastic photos, which extend well beyond war zones, visit his BruceHaleyPictures.com.

Images by Bruce Haley.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and, hopefully, desperately good reporting. But when it comes to the stimulus package—the crucial tonic, we’re told, for our ailing economy—are we getting it?

I’ve been on the prowl for solid, digestible treatments of the strengths and weaknesses of the multi-billion dollar plan, because frankly, I need some help wrapping my head around it. But the stories that seem to be everywhere—those detailing the demise of Obama’s honeymoon (starts around 3:15), accounts of partisan gamesmanship, and analyses of who’s winning the spin wars—make good fodder for gossip sessions, but do little to help us understand how we got into this mess and form educated opinions about the best way out of it.

Here are a few things we found helpful (and have enjoyed) so far:

From the New York Times, lessons the U.S. can learn from Japan’s stimulus spending in the ‘90s, which included heavy infrastructure investments.

Two stories from This American Life and Morning Edition describe the Keynesian approach of the stimulus package (starts around 36:15) and evaluate its merits. TAL has also done great, compelling reporting on the housing and financial crises.

NPR’s Planet Money blog has some handy maps that act as visual guides to the stimulus plan’s expected state-by-state impact.

Marketplace’s “decoder” series translates econ-speak into language normal people can understand.

Keep it coming, people: If you’ve come across particularly good stimulus coverage, let us know about it in the comments section below.

Sources: New York Times, This American Life, Morning Edition, Planet Money, Marketplace

Don’t call Judy Maddren a language cop. CBC’s media language advisor insists such work is both “not in her job description” and pretty near impossible. In an interview with Ryerson Review of Journalism, she discusses the complexities of setting standards for the way Canadian journalists use words.

While some of her work sounds an awful lot like policing—like writing memos on the difference between ‘number’ and amount’ or the correct pronunciation of ‘espresso’—much of it also depends on tricky judgment calls. Even simple phrases carry political weight. Maddren offers ‘oil sands’ and ‘tar sands’ as an example. The terms describe the same thing, but are used by opposing sides in a contentious mining debate: The mining industry employs the former, while environmentalists favor the latter. Her job, in cases like these, is to gather the best information she can and make recommendations when appropriate.

It’s a monumental task, if the CBC language file is any indication. The usage guide, which Maddren alone maintains, currently holds over 12,000 entries. Check out the interview to learn more about the purview of a language advisor and to read her thoughts on why it’s such an important position.

Image courtesy of Bethany L. King, licensed under Creative Commons.

After 9/11 we heard a lot about the death of irony, but after an initial period of mourning, humor prevailed and even thrived in the troubled early aughts.

But with the departure of the president who gave political satire its all-time easiest target, and the arrival of an unflappable and extremely popular president-elect, will practitioners of political satire run out of fodder?

Of course not. The Daily Show’s ascendancy coincided with Bush’s increasingly disastrous presidency, but Jon Stewart & Co. won’t suddenly be irrelevant just because Bush is. “Assuming the Daily Show can only be funny under someone like George W. Bush gives far too much credit to the outgoing President and is obscenely insulting to the writers of the Daily Show,” writes Matt Tobey on Comedy Central’s blog. “As if there wasn't plenty of failed Bush-based humor from shittier sources than the Daily Show.”

Meanwhile, the South Park boys pulled an all-nighter after the election to complete their extremely timely Wednesday broadcast, in which overzealous acolytes of Barack Obama see his victory as license to riot drunkenly in the streets, and Obama’s campaign team shows its true colors as an upscale band of jewel thieves a la Ocean’s Eleven.

These comedy institutions are bellwethers of the general categories into which Obama Humor will fall, at least for now: Poking fun at the extreme fervor of Obama’s supporters, and pointing up the absurd paranoia of Obama’s opposition (much like the New Yorker did all those months ago.)

The reliable Onion covers those satirical bases and more, with headlines like “International Con Man Barack Obama Leaves U.S. With $85 Million In Campaign Fundraising” and “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”.

There’s also the hilarious animated video below, from Get Your War On creator David Rees, making the rounds. (Consider it a sequel to the New Yorker cover.)

And when Obama inevitably falls short of the astronomical expectations set for him, satirists will pounce. The Daily Show’s John Hodgman told Politico, “As much as the show is fake news, its soul is very sincere, borne of a desire that everyone shares, that we don’t want to be lied to. If there is a whiff of insincerity [Obama] will be taken to task.”

For 13 years and 75 issues, No Depression was a beloved chronicler of the alt-country music world. In February of this year, the magazine’s publishers sadly announced they were halting production, citing insufficient ad revenue, a music industry in transition, and the troubled economy.

“Barring the intercession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish,” publishers Grant Alden, Peter Blackstock and Kyla Fairchild wrote in the magazine’s March-April issue.

Just eight months later, Alden and Blackstock provide this addendum: “As it turned out, the angels who interceded to preserve No Depression were mostly well-known to us. Some who responded were rank strangers; all were generous and kind.” So begins issue #76 of the resurrected magazine, in the form of a lavish, 145-page, ad-free paperback—or, in the words of its cover copy, “bookazine (whatever that is).”

Published by the University of Texas Press and hitting stands this week, the theme of Issue #76 is “The Next Generation,” its cover graced by Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet and its profiles mostly devoted to emerging artists like the Infamous Stringdusters, Bowerbirds, and Samantha Crain. Tucked in the back of the issue is a feature on Hanson—yes, that Hanson.

No Depression’s online organ—currently offline, but set to relaunch soon—will continue with news and reviews, along with a near-complete archive of back issues. The bookazine, published semiannually, will contain less time-sensitive content.

In a troubled publishing industry, No Depression’s unique reincarnation might provide a model for other endangered or extinct publications—the bookazine represents one altered, but not necessarily diminished, manifestation of the independent magazine in a changing media landscape.

A wiry thirtysomething guy bikes out of the Whole Foods parking lot, a pannier of organic produce strapped to his rack. He’s on his way home to make dinner after a couple of hours volunteering at the local Obama campaign headquarters. He inches down the driveway, waiting for an opportunity to turn right into the busy rush-hour traffic.

He sees an opening and jumps into the lane, pedaling quickly. But he’s not moving fast enough for a hulking SUV whose impatient driver doesn’t want to change lanes. She tailgates him for several yards, laying on the horn, then swerves into the other lane and tears past him, yelling something about getting on the sidewalk. The cyclist gives her a one-fingered salute, then notices a McCain-Palin sticker on her bumper.

Typical.

We are all guilty of certain prejudices. In the escalating (and increasingly dangerous) tensions between car commuters and bicycle riders, battle lines are drawn. As an avid cyclist leaning fairly hard to port, I had very little reason to interrogate the stereotypes embodied in the scenario above. But eventually a few needling questions penetrated my insulated sphere of thought: What if there are conservatives who ride bikes? What the hell do they look like? And where can I find them?

On the Internet, of course.

“I am a gun-owning, low-taxes, small-government, strong military, anti-baby murder, pro-big/small business, anti-social program, conservative Democrat,” wrote Maddyfish, a poster on Bike Forums, an Internet discussion forum where everyone from the casual hobbyist to the obsessive gearhead can discuss all things bike-related, from frame sizes to the best routes downtown. There are dozens such forums for bicyclists and I recently crashed three of them—Bike Forums, MPLS BikeLove, and Road Bike Review—with a simple question: Are there any conservative cyclists out there? Maddyfish (an online pseudonym) was one of the first to reply: “I find cycling to be a very conservative activity. It saves me money and time.”

And just like that, biking conservatives came out of the cyber-woodwork, offering their own mixtures of bike love and political philosophy. “I do not care about gas prices or the environment. I care about fun and getting where I am quickly,” wrote Old Scratch. “I’m a Libertarian,” wrote Charly17201. “I am extremely conservative, but definitely NOT a GOPer. … I ride my bike because it provides me the opportunity to save even more money for my pleasures now and my retirement in the future (and my retirement fund is NOT the responsibility of the government).”

The more liberal bikers in the forums repeated some variation of this formulation: “Drive to the ride = conservative; bike to the ride = liberal.” In other words, conservatives load bikes onto SUVs and drive them to a riding trail, while liberals incorporate their bikes into every aspect of their personal transportation, whether utilitarian or recreational. For moneyed conservatives with a large portion of their income budgeted for recreation, high-end bikes and gear have taken their place along golf as a rich man’s leisure activity.

But there are conservatives who integrate bikes into their lifestyle just as thoroughly as their liberal counterparts. Mitch Berg is a conservative talk-radio host whose blog, A Shot in the Dark, is divided between political content and chronicles if his experiences commuting by bicycle. “I grew up in rural North Dakota, and biking was one of my escapes when I was in high school and college,” he told me. “It’s my favorite way to try to stay in shape. And if gas fell to 25 cents a gallon, I’d still bike every day.”

Berg doesn’t believe there’s anything inherently political about riding a bike. “But people on both sides of the political aisle do ascribe political significance to biking. The lifestyle-statement bikers, of course, see the act as a political and social statement. And there’s a certain strain of conservatism that sees conspicuous consumption—driving an SUV and chortling at paying more for gas—as a way to poke a finger in the eyes of the environmental left.”

The impression that bikers are liberal is reinforced, Berg feels, by the most vocal and political members of bike culture. These are the folks who corner the media's spotlight (and draw drivers' resentment) with high-profile events like Critical Mass, a group ride that floods downtown streets in many cities at the end of each month as riders zealously reassert their rights to the paths normally traveled by cars. Similarly, when the price of gas climbed to $4 over the summer, the media couldn’t run enough stories about the unprecedented popularity of bike commuting. Activist bikers leveraged the newfound media attention to promote certain messages: that bicycling is an inherently political activity; that cyclists care about traditionally progressive causes like environmental protection; that more tax money should be allocated for bike paths and a transportation infrastructure that takes vehicles other than cars into account.

“The faction of bikers that is fundamentally political has done a good job of tying [bikes and politics] together,” Berg says. “The Green Party has wrapped itself around the bicycle.” But for many, biking is political because everything is political: “You need a public infrastructure to [bike],” wrote Cyclezealot, on Bike Forums. “So, cycling will always be affected by politics, like it or not.”

When politics does bleed into cycling, does it create tensions? I asked Berg if he ever feels outnumbered on group rides dominated by liberals, and if those differences ever come to the fore. “Of course,” he replied, “On several levels. I’m a conservative. I don’t believe in man-made global warming. I’m biking for reasons that are partly personal and partly capitalistic; I don’t want to pay $4 for gas.” But he has made liberal friends based on a common love of cycling. So has William Bain, a retired Naval officer living in the Pacific Northwest whose bike commute is a 43-mile round trip. “Cycling is the common bond I have with my liberal friends,” said Bain. “We can get in a heated passionate argument about politics and then go out and try to ride each other into the ground. Good clean fun.”

Berg and Bain have allies in the government who see bicycle advocacy as a nonpartisan issue. Take Republican Greg Brophy, a Colorado state senator and an avid cyclist who competes in road bike marathons and uses his mountain bike to haul farm equipment. Brophy worked with Bicycle Colorado to pass Safe Routes to School and is supporting a “Green Lanes” bill to give bicyclists safer routes through metro areas.

Conservative cyclists don’t tend to get help from all their political allies, however. Some right-wing personalities know that biking is a hot-button issue and make pointed attacks on cyclists while reinforcing the liberal-cyclist stereotype. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s hard-right columnist Katherine Kersten earned the ire of the Twin Cities bike community in 2007 when she characterized Critical Mass as a mob of “serial lawbreakers” bent on ruining the lives of honorable citizen motorists. “Are you rushing to catch the last few innings of your son's baseball game? Trying to get to the show you promised your wife for her birthday? Critical Mass doesn't give a rip.”

Last fall, Twin Cities talk-radio host Jason Lewis made on-air remarks decrying the “bicycling crowd” as “just another liberal advocacy group.” He recycled a common anti-bike canard—that bicyclists have no rights to the roads because they don’t pay taxes to service those roads—before issuing a call to arms: “The people with the 2,000-pound vehicle need to start fighting back.” Lewis’ comments seem especially reckless in light of recent events: In September alone, four Twin Cities cyclists were killed in collisions with motor vehicles. One conservative blogger celebrates bike fatalities and gleefully anticipates more. “Keep it up,” he tells cyclists, “and the law of averages says we’ll have a few less Obama voters in November.”

While such critics tap into right-wing rage at all things liberal, conservative bikers appeal to a saner tenet of their political tradition: the free market's invisible hand. “Let the market roam free,” Berg exclaimed. “The higher gas goes, the more people will try biking.” And where there’s money to be made, bikes and bike-share programs will emerge. When the Republican National Convention came to the Twin Cities in September, for example, a bike-share program was there to greet it. Humana and Bikes Belong made 1,000 bikes available for rental during the convention, with 70 bikes staying behind as part of a permanent rental program.

Conservatives on bikes represent the breakdown of party-line stereotypes. They are heartening examples of crucial divergences from the lazy red/blue dichotomy the pundits are relentlessly hammering in these last frenzied days of campaign season. They are a microcosm in which a stereotype falls away to reveal an actual individual. What's more, they represent not just the abandonment of tired clichés, but more bikes on the road—something all of us on two wheels, regardless of our political idiosyncrasies, can agree is a good thing.

Image by  Kyknoord , licensed by  Creative Commons . 

A controversy erupted recently in upstate New York, when public high school teachers tried to use yoga to help students relax before tests, the Associated Press reports. Parents and community members, including a Baptist minister, alleged that the program blurred the line between church and state and might indoctrinate students into Hinduism.

The immense popularity of yoga in secular society could render its religious provenance moot, but Mollie Ziegler at GetReligion points out, “whether or not yoga can be divorced from Hinduism, to the Hindu it certainly is a religious discipline.” Ziegler quotes yoga experts who argue that the practice’s secularization has stripped away its mental and spiritual components and focused solely on the body, robbing yoga of much of its power by re-branding it as a get-fit-quick regimen. The AP article hints at this tension, but never tackles it, causing Ziegler to write, “it's just a weak story all around.”

For more on the rocky relationship between yoga and the press, read Robert Love's "Fear of Yoga" from the March/April 2007 issue of Utne Reader. 

Photo by Angela Sevin, licensed by Creative Commons.

The press finally found something more compelling to cover than Sarah Palin: “It's the economy, stupid,” according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Each week in its news index, PEJ breaks down the storylines that are filling the nation's news holes, and the results can be quite telling. The week of September 15–21 marked the first time since the Democratic National Convention that campaign coverage had been dominated by a story without Palin as its central character. According to PEJ, the economy sprinted to the top of the pack that week, accounting for 43.3 percent of campaign coverage.

But, “the focus on the economy practically came out of the blue,” despite the fact that our financial woes had been brewing for some time, says PEJ. Take a look at campaign coverage for the week of September 8 – 14:

NPR aired a story this week that may offer some explanation. Media consultant Jeff Jarvis tells David Folkenflik that even the media are overwhelmed by the nature of the news these days. “It’s just too big and too complicated, and it requires both too much background and fundamental understanding about economics,” Jarvis said. Folkenflik writes that the media is struggling to keep up with such huge national developments in the midst of a presidential campaign. “The breakneck pace of developments means a lot of news worth knowing receives the briefest burst of attention before being dropped for something hotter.”

Charts courtesy of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a project of the Pew Research Center. "Top Campaign Storylines of the Week, September 15-21," published September 22. "Top Campaign Storylines of the Week, September 8-14," published September 15.

In case you hadn’t heard the good news, Bitch has been saved—and then some. On Monday, September 15, the Portland-based feminist magazine issued a red-alert call for donations: They needed to raise $40,000 by October 15, they said, in order to print the next issue.

“Save Bitch!” posts quickly spread throughout the blogosphere, and within three days, they’d surpassed their goal—they were already looking at $46,000. And even then, donations kept pouring in; they’re up to about $55,000 as of last week, according to Bitch publisher Debbie Rasmussen.

If you’re wondering how an independent magazine is able to mobilize that much support in an economy this crappy, look no further than the lovefests—er, comments sections—here and here. People feel invested in Bitch, in its past and present and future; they remember the first time they read it, and what they’ve loved and hated about it; it speaks to them so strongly that they feel it’s worth more than $20 a year. That depth of connection, that strength of community—that is the future of independent publishing.

Creative Loafing Inc., which owns eponymous alt-weeklies in Tampa, Atlanta, Sarasota, and Charlotte, as well as the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September 29. CEO Ben Eason assured employees that the move will leave editorial budgets and staffs intact, and it looks like all six titles are planning to continue publishing in print, though editors are being encouraged to pursue "web-first" strategies. 

“I’m filing [bankruptcy] because the economy sucks,” said Eason, whose parents founded Creative Loafing Atlanta in 1972. He told employees that the "safe harbor" of Chapter 11 would allow the company to work out a solid online advertising strategy and reorder its finances.

“This isn’t a failing company,” Eason wrote in an email to his newspapers’ executives, “but instead one caught squarely by this challenging economy between old media and new media.”

If you’re not familiar with Bitch or haven’t read it in a while, here's the lowdown: It is a 12-year-old independent magazine that looks at feminism through a pop-culture lens. It is genuine and earnest and playful at turns; it is surprising, incisive; it is the only print magazine out there doing what it is doing.

And I have to say, as a longtime fan of Bitch, this magazine just keeps getting better and better: The writing is tighter, the analysis deeper, the pieces more varied with every (quarterly) installment. I flagged nearly every article in their new issue (#41) to discuss at our next pitch meeting—to name just a couple of standouts, there’s an energetic discussion about why “it’s a new golden age of young-adult fiction,” despite continued censorship of books with “adult” language and sexual content, and an awesome, inspiring Q&A with the Detroit hip-hop artist and activist Invincible (articles not available online).

Please watch this short video in which Bitch’s top ladies, Debbie Rasmussen (publisher) and Andi Zeisler (editorial and creative director) explain the magazine’s plight. Basically, they need $40,000 by October 15 to print their next issue, and it looks like donations are already pouring in. (Bitches make great gifts, too!)

UPDATE (9/19/2008): Bitch has already surpassed its goal! They raised a mind-boggling $46,000 this week, which means their next issue will hit newsstands December 1. Hooray for happy indie-press news!

Sarah Palin’s performance on ABC last week has been extensively analyzed, but as the only journalist allowed access to the candidate since her announcement, how did Charles Gibson do?

Before the interview, speculation swirled about whether Gibson would go easy on Palin, and pundits and voters from around the country advised him on what to ask. Was he tough enough, too tough, and were your questions answered?

Jack Shafer at Slate gives Gibson high marks: “At every point in the Q&A, Gibson had the right follow-up questions to elicit more from Palin, including after he asked the Bush Doctrine cringe-maker.”

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz liked Gibson’s work, too: “What the ABC newsman conducted yesterday was a serious, professional interview that went right at the heart of what we want and need to know about the governor: Could she be president? Does she understand the nuances of international affairs? Does she have a world view?” (Thanks, TVNewser.)

Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics recaps reader responses as mixed: “Speaking of Gibson, some people thought he was fair, while others said he looked like set out to try and make Palin look bad. More than a few mentioned what they saw as his condescending attitude—a number described Gibson's demeanor in terms of a snobby professor delivering a pop quiz while looking down his nose at his subject.”

The conservative blog Newsbusters has no praise for Gibson: “But there was more than Charlie's sneering condescending tone, looking down over the rim of his glasses like some snobby intellectual that bothered me. Twisting her words into a fabrication feeding the fear of theocracy was utterly insulting.”

The liberal blog Crooks and Liars thinks Gibson did fine: “To his credit, Charlie Gibson actually did a pretty good job of grilling Sarah Palin in her first interview since accepting the Republican nomination.”

My two cents: I was glad to see him push her, but also thought he missed some follow-up questions. One that stuck out: When asked what special insight into Russia Alaska’s proximity to the country gave her, Palin responded that you can actually see Russia from Alaska. Gibson moved on.

Hosted by Sarah Haskins with sardonic, faux-naïve enthusiasm, “Target: Women” is the standout segment of Current TV’s online news show infoMania.

In each episode, Haskins sets her sights on an especially ridiculous media trend targeting the young female demographic, satirizing the insipid pop-culture trends that nevertheless remain infuriatingly popular, such as reality shows about weddings (“They put the ‘we’ in ‘wedding’ and the ‘end’ in ‘feminism’”), birth control ads (“It’s Yaz, the pill that stops all those symptoms, so you can do the women things you love, like run, wear big earrings, hug friends, and have a cool, non-specific media job”), and chick flicks (“She’s in for a surprise, when: unlikely suitor / high-concept hijinks / unnecessary obstacle / true love / happy ending!”).

Haskins got an easy target when Sarah Palin became John McCain’s VP pick. In her Palin segment, Haskins slyly celebrates that mythical demographic of Hillary supporters who the McCain campaign cynically believes will vote for Palin simply because she’s a woman. Haskins calls them P.A.N.T.H.E.R.s—joining other jungle-cat demographics like PUMAs and Cougars—whose acronym stands for “Proud American Needing Token Hillary Estrogen Replacement.”

Like the Daily Show or the Onion, “Target: Women” is smart satire disguised as hilarious pop-culture commentary. I hope that Sarah Haskins keeps it up for as long as the media cynically exploits her demographic—which is to say, forever.

(Thanks, Laura.)

We all know how much fun it is to gather around a television with like-minded friends and shout snide things at the unpalatable speeches being broadcast. Now imagine doing that in a theater filled with 300 drunk liberals. 

That’s precisely what I did last Thursday, at the tail end of Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead’s multimedia satire, Shoot the Messenger. The show holds weekly performances in New York City, where Winstead and her ensemble spoof the week’s headlines during a parodic morning news show called Wake Up World (“America’s only 6-hour morning show!”)

But last week, in dubious honor of the RNC, Winstead’s troupe brought their show to her native Minneapolis for three nights at the Parkway Theater. Each evening’s events went beyond mere theater to include live feeds from the RNC and musical performances from revered protest singer Billy Bragg and local legends Dan Wilson, Jim Walsh, and Grant Hart.

Before the show, the Parkway’s seats were mostly full of chatty people munching popcorn as the onstage screen showed eminently believable ads for the “24/7 Infonewsment Network’s” fake shows, such as Poll Dancing with sexy anchorwoman Emily Rackcheck and MedicAsian with Dr. Vijay Jay.

Winstead and her co-star Baron Vaughn starred as Wake Up World’s chipper, clueless hosts Hope Jean Paul and Davis Miles. Hope Jean Paul is, like her creator, from the Twin Cities area: “I’m originally from Coon Rapids,” she chirped, to which Vaughn (who is African American) replied, “Wow! Sounds like my kind of place!” Naughty laughter erupted and Winstead replied, “Now, Davis, try not to be offended by the name, just because it contains the word Rapids.”

That joke set the tone for the show, whose mix of absurdity and topical satire has made Winstead’s more famous brainchild the Daily Show a media phenomenon for over a decade. Wake Up World, even more so than the Daily Show or its cousin the Colbert Report, is an acerbic and overtly partisan takedown of our leaders’ hypocrisies and the 24-hour news cycle’s vapid excesses.

In true morning-show form, Winstead and Vaughn hyped insipid segments like Lumpy the Cancer-Sniffing Dog, who they promised would find the one lucky audience member with a malignant tumor. A pro–big oil energy “expert” was brought in to discuss his new book The Town Pump: Alternatives to Alternative Energy. And a member of private security contractor Blackwater sat down with the hosts to discuss his new miracle fitness regimen: “Extreme Waterboard Abs.”

Pulchritudinous newsgal Emily Rackcheck delivered hourly news updates in a low-cut sweater and miniskirt. Bloviators Hunter Carlsbad (wearing a bowtie) and Daniels Midland (host of the Complication Room) shouted at each other during a Crossfire-style segment touted as “a debate between both sides of the political spectrum: the Far Right and the Right of Center!”

Winstead also tailored the show to the region with pre-taped biographical puff pieces on Laurie Coleman and Michelle Bachman subtitled “Behind the Taut Canvas.” There were ads for “a 31-part investigative series” called White in America and a gauzy video appeal from Sarah Silverman for charitable donations to private contracting firms.

After Wake Up World concluded, the evening shifted gears for its second segment, where Winstead reappeared as herself and sat down with liberal talk-radio host Ed Schultz to discuss the RNC—specifically Palin, whose fur-coat photo Winstead captioned “Wasilla DeVille.” Schultz was witty and affable, assuring us that McCain’s campaign would buckle under the weight of its own hypocrisy: “Look, everything’s going to be fine. And if it’s not, then we get another vice president who might shoot someone in the face!”

This marathon mix of political discourse, satire, and campy theatre was only a prelude, however, for the evening’s main event: a massive group viewing of John McCain’s speech. The audience, now well-lubricated and ready to laugh not so much with satirical glee as incredulous derision, filed back into the theater as McCain’s hagiographic video was playing on the giant screen, which had been tuned to MSNBC’s live feed from the convention.

As the man himself took the stage, the theater audience erupted with boos and squeals. The people around me gladly obeyed the rules of a drinking game Winstead had announced earlier: that we hoist our glasses every time the word maverick was used. Genuine cheers burst forth when MSNBC’s cameras zoomed in on the IVAW and Code Pink protestors who had infiltrated the hall.

As the speech dragged on and John McCain’s smiling rictus became increasingly creepy, the Parkway crowd got rowdier and my convention fatigue peaked. Around the moment when the last poorly programmed image appeared behind the penis-shaped stage, I fled the theater for some fresh air. When I went back inside a few minutes later, I encountered a completely different scene which cleared my head, the perfect antidote to the televised nightmare we’d just seen: Dan Wilson was playing his ubiquitous and charming hit single “Closing Time” to a much smaller crowd gathered near the front of the theater, kicking off one of Jim Walsh’s famous Hootenannies. Then Grant Hart took the stage, and the aging avatars of the Minneapolis counterculture settled further into their seats to watch their heroes perform, resting after a long evening—and week—of politicized sensory overload.

Personalized advertisements will soon make the leap from the internet to your TV screen, writes Brian Morrissey for Mediaweek. Within the next ten years, cable companies will be working with networks to customize commercials for individual viewers based on their interests and communities.

How will they find this information? Simple: You'll give it to them. Morrissey, citing a new report by Forrester Research, notes that the advent of on-demand programming and the availability of local demographics often provide cable companies with as much information about their subscribers as a web browser does. Eventually, the Forrester report suggests, these (non-skippable) ads will allow your TV to function more like the web, where you can go from ad to point of purchase with the push of a few buttons. But is this true innovation, or is corporate greed just getting more wily?

Image by  Frenkieb , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Throughout the Obama campaign, Michelle has been skewered for her remarks on the stump, but her speech at Monday night's DNC kickoff got decent, even good, reviews across the political spectrum. Here’s a roundup of quick takes on the potential First Lady’s delivery:

Here's Jim Geraghty for the National Review:

In one sense, Michelle's speech did what it needed to tonight, and that is... little or no harm. It was a serving of mashed potatoes from her, but considering her comments that have generated headlines so far in this campaign, generic happy talk about working hard and dreaming bigger and aiming higher will be a pleasant surprise.

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan raved:

There was plenty I didn't like about this night, as you can tell if you scroll down. But it succeeded in the most important task. Michelle did it. She more than did it. She struck fear in the GOP tonight. Their lies about the Obamas will fail. As they should.

Newsweek tapped former Republican speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and former Democratic speechwriter Michael Waldman for their takes, and both were impressed. Says Gerson:

Michelle Obama [was] impressive—confident, fluent, and appealingly personal. The sharp political edge she has sometimes shown on the stump was nowhere in evidence. Instead, she told a compelling working class story and rooted her own considerable accomplishments in the American dream. She clearly brings a liberal sensitivity to a variety of issues, but, in this speech, it was the soft liberalism of service and community, not the hard liberalism of anger and radicalism.

James Forsyth of the Spectator was only slightly disappointed:

Michelle Obama played it safe tonight. Gone was the sassy campaigner I remember seeing in Iowa and South Carolina. The aim of the speech was to introduce Michelle Obama to the public and to dispel the idea of her as an angry, divisive figure. On that score, it worked. 

And Dahlia Lithwick of Slate had this sharp analysis:

Here is a woman with a degree from Harvard Law School, who could have talked about law and policy and poverty, and yet she talked about her kids, her husband, and her family. And she didn't do that merely to show us that smart women are soft and cuddly on the inside. She did what everyone else in this campaign is terrified to do: She risked looking sappy and credulous and optimistic when almost everyone has abandoned "hope" and "change" for coughing up hairballs of outrage. Every Democrat in America seems to be of the view that optimism is so totally last February; that now's the time to hunker down and panic real hard. Good for Michelle for reminding us that to "strive for the world as it should be" is still cool, and for being so passionate about that fact that she looked to be near tears.

Watch Michelle Obama's speech:

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, click here.

Twitter isn't the only new website that's changing the party conventions. This week’s gala also has the distinction of being the first Demcoratic National Convention of the YouTube era. Throngs of delegates, protestors, and journalists (professional or otherwise), armed with video cameras, are descending on Denver and swarming the Pepsi Center in hopes of capturing a politician’s gaffe, a protestor’s stunt, or a police officer’s unwarranted action.

The footage is already piling up: There's a Fox News crew accosted by angry protestors, a clash between anti- and pro-abortion rights advocates, and disgruntled protestors being corralled by police (though the inclusion of the word “RIOT” in the clip’s title might be overselling the scuffle). There’s also an interview with Hillary Clinton supporters—not quite as formidable as the media would have us believe—reasoning that their candidate still has a chance of clinching the nomination.

Inside the convention itself, small gatherings and speeches that might get passed over by national networks are being captured by the video sharing site. These include a standout speech by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) at a breakfast meeting. Also inside the walls of the convention center, a video meme is growing in strength as conventioneers shoot “I Nominate Barack Obama Because…” clips at the YouTube booth in the lobby. 

For busy people who missed the live television broadcasts, YouTube is also a good place to find clips from network coverage of the convention, such as Ted Kennedy’s opening-night speech. Though interested viewers should watch these clips now, since they clearly violate copyright laws.

Image courtesy of jonsson, licensed by Creative Commons.

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, click here.

As the Democratic National Convention kicks off, there will be no shortage of right-wing “faux outrage” gleaned from the heavily covered procession in Denver, mused smintheus over at Daily Kos.

He compiled a list of what to look out for from the ultra-conservative talking heads. Among the possible targets: the Obamas using their children as a political ploy, too many dark-skinned speakers, lights dimmed/not dimmed during the national anthem, or the ill-mannered protesters outside the Pepsi Center. Fox News’ Griff Jenkins already has a jump-start on this last point.

One thing many Dems are hoping will not show up on the rant roundups? Convention-goers ridiculing John McCain’s military service. Despite the blatant mocking of John Kerry’s military service at the 2004 Republican National Convention—where delegates brandished Band-Aids with purple hearts drawn on them—even a benign reference to John McCain’s time in Vietnam by anyone in attendance might induce frothing at the mouth and accusations of “going negative.” We saw this already with the media’s coverage of Gen. Wesley Clark’s comment concerning McCain’s military cred. Just another example of Republican hypocrisy, writes Kangaroo Brisbane Australia on the ReBelle Nation blog.

We’ll just have to wait and see which possible targets emerge as the dominant force behind the bulging eyes and pulsing veins of the media worlds’ attack dogs.

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, click here.

User-generated news projects continue to flourish and compete directly with mainstream media. Recent developments in the world of citizen journalism underscore both the promise and the pitfalls of this emerging field.

The global news site Allvoices (“the first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere,” according to their banner) is upping the ante by offering cash incentives for popular news stories. Allvoices users who submit articles gathering 100,000 page views over six months will receive $1,000, and a million page views in the same period will net the author $100,000.

Meanwhile, Mediabistro reports that CNN’s three-year-old citizen journalism offshoot iReport is gaining traction, with “85,000 people registered as ‘reporters.’” The site’s “watershed moment” came in April 2007 when it ran a cell-phone video of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Finally, Global Voices passes along news of YouTube’s citizen journalism contest, which is soliciting three-minute videos “about someone in your community you believe should be known by the rest of the world.”

I’m all for the proliferation of diverse alternatives to the mainstream media, and citizen journalism looks like it’s here to stay, for better or worse. iReport provides a repository for eyewitness news and user videos, and YouTube’s video contest is an intriguing experiment. But the flaw in Allvoices’ incentive model seems obvious: To what lengths will people go in order to rack up page views for that cash reward? How will Allvoices ensure the credibility of its stories? If a winning story is revealed to be false, but the page views still add up, does the author still get the money? The scheme is reminiscent of Gawker Media’s business model, which also raises ethical questions.

Even when tenacious amateur journalists with good intentions place themselves on the front lines of an event—rather than, say, snarking from afar à la Gawker—they can’t always be counted upon to produce accurate stories. At Open Democracy, Evgeny Morozov provides a thorough commentary on citizen journalists’ coverage of the Russia-Georgia conflict. While mainstream news organizations scrambled to get reporters to the Caucasus in the conflict’s first days, native bloggers began filing regular dispatches. But problems quickly emerged, Morozov argues. The first was trust: News reports have appeared on blogs with little or no credibility or previous reporting history. Furthermore, internet access and technological resources are scarce in the region, and average citizens lack the budget necessary to capture quality video footage.

None of these shortcomings are likely to spell the end of citizen journalism, however, and that’s a good thing. In the coming years, methods of amateur reporting will no doubt be refined, the kinks ironed out, sound practices developed. Cash incentives like the ones offered by Allvoices are probably not a good idea, but that conflict of interest is not unique to amateur journalism—it’s no secret that the corporate media world is full of people placing profit ahead of journalistic integrity. Yes, there are problems created by such a huge and diverse range of enterprises in citizen media, but the cream will rise to the top, as user-driven media hubs like the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Citizen Media have already demonstrated.

Image courtesy of sskennel, licensed under Creative Commons.

Last week, Vin Crosbie, an outspoken critic of the so-called “digital revolution,” predicted that more than half of the nearly 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States “won't exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of the next decade.”

As blogs take over print columns and advertisers study up on their HTML, the bricks and mortar of the physical newsroom are left in awkward limbo. Office work takes up less space than it did even 10 years ago, with computers that can slide through cracks in the sidewalk and rolodexes that amount to nothing more than pixels. Those lucky small-publications writers who haven’t yet been laid off are increasingly working from home, leaving behind decorated cubicles and monthly office birthday parties.

The Mother Jones website features graphic designer Martin Gee’s glimpse at one such dying newsroom, the San Jose Mercury News. Gee's photographs document a fluorescently lit ghost town, from its ever-blinking voicemail alerts to a graveyard of unplugged monitors. He captured the detritus of a shrinking staff from April to June 2008, when he was caught in a round of layoffs and left the paper. (View his entire "Reduction in Force" collection here.)

One must wonder how much hollow air our skyscrapers contain behind their mirrored windows, and if, in our age of continuous development, we might look toward existing space to get the job done.

Images courtesy of Martin Gee.

Muslimah Media Watch hipped me to Chay, a new online magazine that aims to foster discussions about sex and sexuality in Pakistani society.

“Pakistani don’t have a way in which to talk about sex that is not derogatory, abusive, or silencing,” Chay cofounder Kyla Pasha told In The Fray. “Far from sex ed in school or even the home, straight, young people aren’t even comfortable talking about being in relationships. The perils of that kind of silence are great.” 

From Chay's mission statement:

The taboo and silence around sex and sexuality are oppressive on all of us, irrespective of gender, and lead, at the very least, to unhappiness in our daily lives and, more often, to violence, shame, depression, ill health and general social malaise. We at Chay Magazine endeavor to bring to the Pakistani reading public a place to converse about those things we are most shy of. Our hope is that, through this, we can become braver and stronger, more powerful, self-assured, and just and fair members of society.

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer wonders why news outlets are sending 15,000 reporters to this year’s Republican and Democratic conventions. “[T]hese political gatherings tend to produce very little real news,” Shafer writes. “Yet the networks, the newspapers, the magazines, and the Web sites continue to insist on sending battalions of reporters to sift for itsy specks of information.”

It’d be one thing if that were, say, 15,000 news outlets each sending one reporter. But it’s not. Even Slate, Shafer says, is sending eight reporters to Denver and six to St. Paul.

In a year of blistering cost-cutting and layoffs, and with remaining reporters spread ever more thinly, is this really the best use of newspapers’ dollars? Might many of those 15,000 reporters not be better utilized to, say, cover local news during the two weeks of the conventions?

“As news organizations dwindle,” writes Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, “this is an irresponsible use of resources and it only shows how the industry’s leaders are tied to doing things the way they always did them. That’s what will be the death of journalism.”

It’s probably fair to say that what happens inside convention walls is thoroughly rehearsed, uninspiring, and un-newsworthy. But what’s surprising about that? Most reporters worth their salt know that, as with any well-orchestrated media circus, the good stories lie well beyond convention parameters. Minnesota Public Radio’s Bob Collins urges journalists to take a few detours: “Look for a better location to learn the real stories behind the script from which the Dems and Republicans want the media to read.” 

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

That culturally ubiquitous slice of youth culture known as hipsters now finds itself under the microscope of the always provocative Adbusters. The magazine’s latest issue—and, to some extent, its overall editorial mission—is predicated on the alleged cultural malaise of the past 50 years, beginning with the rise of postwar consumer culture as an inevitable byproduct of Western ingenuity. “Practical cleverness beats the crap out of spiritual wisdom on the battlefield and in the marketplace, as the West has made clear over the last 500 years,” the preface declares. “But cleverness without wisdom sooner or later destroys life.”

Douglas Haddow’s lead essay, "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization," takes it from there, positing hipsters as avatars of the narcissism and spiritual emptiness Adbusters laments, and as the probable harbingers of civilization’s decline. “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum," Haddow writes. "So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style.”

As much as the cantankerous square in me wants to see hedonistic youngsters taken down a peg, I think this essay might be giving hipsters a bit too much credit, overestimating both their cultural impact and longevity while longing nostalgically for a chimeral sense of past “cool” whose own authenticity is itself suspect. “An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather than creating it,” Haddow claims. But is this sort of inversion really so unprecedented? Are hipsters the first generation to practice it? And isn’t it more accurate to say that all youth everywhere, not just hipsters, end up doing both the creating and the consuming of culture, with the advertising and entertainment industries serving as mediators?

Yes, the commodification of cool is obnoxious, but it’s not novel and it’s not an agent of the apocalypse. Casting oneself and one’s peers as the “last generation, a culmination of all previous things”—as Haddow does, in his essay’s dour conclusion—displays the same narcissism and myopia as the culture he’s skewering. Hipsters are really nothing more than the latest manifestation of the disaffected, nihilistic youth population that mutates into a new form with each generation. They’re an obnoxious but essentially innocuous pocket of youth culture whose era is already waning, especially now that hipsterdom has been thoroughly assimilated into mainstream culture, branded, and codified into a household word. The hipster fad is now so ubiquitous as to be almost meaningless: everyone and no one is a hipster.

Besides, I’m immediately suspicious of any author who posits the “end” of anything. Hipsters represent the end of Western civilization? Really? Alarmist generalizations are guaranteed to sell magazines and generate angry emails to the editor—in fact, the inevitable debate will probably be more interesting than the article that inspired it. But ultimately, I suspect hipsters are simply kids in a phase they’ll eventually grow out of, just like the Gen-Xers, punks, hippies, beatniks, and flappers before them.

Image by Joseph Mohan. 

The Columbia Journalism Review recently inaugurated “Parting Thoughts,” an ongoing series of letters from former journalists writing on the biz and its future. In the handful of letters published thus far, there are a lot of wise words—and surprisingly few embittered ones.

Some write about their path to an entirely new career, like Tracy Gordon Fox’s elegant letter describing her shift from crime reporter to nursing student, and John Biemer’s explaining why he chose med school over the Chicago Tribune. Others share their thoughts on the downfall of newspapers, and most offer some form of advice (encouraging, terrifying, or some combination of the two) to all the would-be journalists out there. Here’s former Wall Street Journal editor Winston Wood:

If you’re interested in journalism, even now, give it a shot. It’s a great way to learn about the world, develop communication and analytical skills, and provide a public service. But over the long haul, there’s more stability and better money to be made panhandling.

Not to be confused with the personalized mixes we make for ourselves and our friends, underground mix tapes—or these days, mixes burned to CDs—are the DIY recordings that unsigned hip-hop acts hawk on the street and at their shows.

Hip-hop mix tapes emanate from an involved subculture that the young magazine Foundation covers with an insider’s expertise. Philadelphia Weekly profiled the magazine’s founders, a trio of young men who began the magazine four years ago, lacking any formal writing experience but recognizing an underserved niche of mix tape criticism and commentary.

While rock bands peddle demos, unsigned hip-hop artists make mixes of themselves rapping over cobbled-together beats. It’s how most major performers, such as 50 Cent and Lil Wayne, got their start, and many major-label artists still reserve their rawest material for the medium, as if to repay their oldest and most loyal fans.

It’s an ethos that naturally appeals to DIY enthusiasts in other art forms, like writing. In the Believer, Found magazine’s Davy Rothbart was moved to sing the praises of mix tapes—arguably the sonic analog to his scrappy literary enterprise:

“The sleek and sanded major-label concoctions on sale at Circuit City are counterbalanced by hundreds, maybe thousands of great, unheard albums … I can’t help but respect the punk-rock, DIY spirit of anybody who makes art and tries to sell it to strangers on the street. After all, I do the same shit myself: Every year I hop in a van and go city to city selling my zines.”

Foundation has followed an upward trajectory similar to the artists it covers, from small-time music mag to venerated authority. Its story is heartening not simply because its writers are passionate about their subjects, but also because the magazine is a runaway success—an increasingly rare thing in today’s print-media landscape.

The New York Times reports that the military is cracking down on photojournalists who take pictures they don’t approve of, in many cases booting photographers from their embeds or keeping them away from combat. “By a recent count,” the article claims, “only half a dozen Western photographers were covering a war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.”

Chris Hondros, a photographer for Getty Images, was removed from his embed after one of his photos—a haunting image of a hysterical 5-year-old girl whose parents had just been killed by U.S. soldiers—was widely published. (We featured the photo in our May-June issue, with George Packer's essay “Kindness Amid Carnage: The Iraq We Don’t See.”) Hondros did, however, find an embed in a different city.

The military’s embed policies don’t just keep photos of wounded and dead Iraqis out of our newspapers. “After five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths,” the New York Times reports, “searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.”

Pro-Obama bias and soft-focus hagiographies of the candidate are such common tropes that they’ve been lampooned by Saturday Night Live and the Onion. During the Democratic primaries, it was clear that the press was more enamored of Barack Obama than of Hillary Clinton. But similar assumptions about media coverage of the general election—that its bears traces of Nixon vs. Kennedy, with the press giving the mediagenic Obama a pass and training its guns on the stodgy, less PR-savvy John McCain—may be off the mark.

George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs, which has previously released studies touted by conservative commentators to bolster their accusations of a liberal media bias, has just published new evidence of a mainstream media bias against Barack Obama. (Liberal bloggers gripe that these same conservative commentators might “accidentally not notice” the new report.)

The study’s author is Robert Lichter, a Fox News contributor who authored the aforementioned reports alleging a liberal media bias. But now he finds that when anchors and reporters on the big three networks ventured opinions about Obama, “28 percent of the statements were positive for Obama and 72 percent negative,” with a much narrower margin for McCain. And that’s not even taking into account Fox News’ more brazenly biased Obama coverage.

Meanwhile, the Tyndall Report states that Obama has received more than twice as much network airtime as McCain, but James Rainey of the L.A. Times points out that while such airtime may be ample, it’s not always favorable—just cast your mind back to the Jeremiah Wright “scandal.”

Rainey also echoes an old but probably accurate explanation for Lichter’s findings: News organs are concerned about being accused of liberal bias by the Hannitys and O’Reillys of the world, so they swing too far to the other extreme. 

Image by  My Hobo Soul , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Why do cable news shows exist? They don’t break news, but once they find a story they like—the Reverend Wright kerfuffle or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for example—the talking heads will bang on the controversy like a child with a saucepan and a metal spoon. And the problems with cable news don’t stay quarantined inside of Fox News or CNN. A recent article for the American Journalism Review (AJR) scrutinizes the "cable news effect" on the rest of the mainstream media. Most journalists understandably recoil at the notion of the 24-hour news networks influencing editorial decisions, but cable news’ ability to keep a story on the media agenda is undeniable.

Cable news viewership is eclipsed by that of network news, according to research by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), but its influence is not to be underestimated. One reason, according to AJR, is that most mainstream newsrooms have at least one television constantly tuned to a 24 hour news network. Some editors have spoken of an “osmosis” effect, where the cable news ideas tend to seep into the minds of the rest of the media.

It must be difficult for cable news programmers to fill some 18 hours of programming each day. But instead of focusing on important issues, PEJ research shows that, “tabloid-tinged crime and celebrity” stories and bombastic pundits tend to dominate the airwaves. The repetitive, formulaic coverage offered by the 24-hour news networks doesn’t always serve to elevate public discourse, but it gets the point across.

The problem is that the cable news formula has been working. The AJR reports that cable news has been gaining in  popularity and prestige over recent years, and so far there’s no reason to think that trend won’t continue. So long as cable news continue to influence the rest of the media, those talking heads won’t go away any time soon.

Over at Feministe, a post on pro-feminist TV shows for kids kicked up a lively discussion, with commenters writing in to suggest everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Cosby Show. A lot of sci-fi shows seem to pop up (I was pleased to see a few Battlestar Galactica mentions, since it’s a smart show with a host of strong female characters), as do a number of British programs, like The Sarah Jane Adventures and The Worst Witch.

Check out the extensive list the folks at Feministe came up with. Can you think of any other kid-friendly shows that espouse pro-feminist values? Chat in the Utne salons.

Image by Tc7, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s been an eventful week for the hip-hop artist Nas. Wednesday afternoon, he joined ColorofChange.org and MoveOn.org outside of Fox News Channel’s New York City headquarters to protest the network's coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign—treatment that he and the groups allege is racist. (SOHH and Racewire have photos of the demonstration.)

The rapper then proceeded to an appearance on the Colbert Report with a 620,127-signature petition demanding that network president Roger Ailes "find a solution to address racial stereotyping and hate-mongering before it hits the airwaves." He also performed the anti-Fox track “Sly Fox” from his new album, which debuted at #1 on Tuesday after months of controversy over its title. Nas originally planned to call the LP Nigger, but abandoned the idea amid qualms from music retailers and his label. Ultimately, he released the album eponymously.

Nas' Fox-slamming and Billboard chart–topping comes at a time of heightened racial tensions in the media: not just criticism of Fox’s Obama coverage, but last week’s New Yorker cover brouhaha and ongoing questions about the role that race plays in Obama’s campaign. This week, the Root explores younger generations’ relationship to race, with a series of essays about Generation Y’s post-racist ambitions, its use of the n-word, and its supposed colorblindness. 

Image by kokuziu, licensed under Creative Commons.

The rise of photo-sharing sites like Flickr has been great for amateur photographers, bloggers, visual learners, and procrastinators—but at what cost to professional photojournalism, an expensive-by-comparison service that many editors can’t or won’t justify paying for?

In the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (article not available online), Alissa Quart presents a nuanced, clear-headed view of how photojournalism is changing, outlining the risks (and benefits) of the rise of the amateur. “If they are taking snapshots,” Quart writes, “amateur photographers are likely not developing a story, or developing the kind of intimacy with their subjects that brings revelation.”

There’s still a special recipe to be a “real” photojournalist, and it’s not just the “trained” or “expert” eye but rather the sheer hours put into each assignment and the ability to sustain a thought, image, or impulse through a number of images, not just a single snapshot.

To present an image that tells the story, the photographer needs to know what that story is. (Of course, so do the writers and editors involved.) As with other content that’s increasingly hustled into column space in print and online, if photographs (and photographers) aren’t vetted, readers are more likely to be misled.

“I am optimistic about the future of photojournalism,” Quart writes, “but not of the photojournalism I most admire.”

Image by mikebaird, licensed under Creative Commons.

As politicians and businesses in the Twin Cities rev up for the Republican National Convention this September, groups throughout the region from all points on the political spectrum are preparing to welcome the GOP to town in various unique ways.

There’s the expected mobilization of protest groups, but there are also anti-authoritarian zines, yard-sign contests, zealous corporate sponsors, and tacky-pants enthusiasts. The latest addition to this list is cartoonists, who have lent their RNC-themed drawings to the hometown alt-weekly, City Pages, for its second-annual Comix Issue.

The offerings by local artists are many and varied, especially in the unabridged online edition. Titles range from “Elephantitis” to “Michelle Bachman’s RNC Diary” to “Zubaz of Freedom,” the last an homage to the RNC's aforementioned tacky-pants mandate.

The quality varies—some of the strips falter when they load up their panels with tired jabs at easy targets; others buckle under self-seriousness—but in general it’s a fair sampling of the area’s artists and their political wit. One of my favorites is “Xcape From Xcel,” by Kevin Cannon, a single-panel strip envisioning a board game inside the convention's host arena, the Xcel Energy Center (which was also, incidentally, the venue for Barack Obama's first speech as the presumptive Democratic nominee back in June). For example, one square says, “You’re wearing a flag pin! Continue playing.”

The progressive blogosphere is a-ragin’ today about the rumor-mongering, naive, chaos-inspiring New Yorker cover of Michelle and Barack Obama terrorist-fist-jabbing in the Oval Office as a portrait of Osama bin Laden approvingly gazes on, alit by the flames of an American flag sizzling in the fireplace. 

Progressives are pissed, and to prove it, they’ve dug out their lit-crit hats to scold illustrator Barry Blitt on the inner workings of satire and why he missed the boat and fell into no-no land. (I think the man who came up with this cover

probably has a thing or two to teach us all about good satire.)

When I mentioned the hubbub to Utne’s art director, Stephanie Glaros, she told me the illustrator blogs were equally enflamed, but in Blitt’s defense. Thank goodness some folks have thick enough skins to rally to his side. Let’s just hope that some of that sensibility migrates from the art world to the political commentariat sometime soon.

First off, progressives need to stop playing thought police to protect those weak-minded ninnies from Hicksville. Here’s a prime example from Rachel Sklar at HuffingtonPost: “Who knows if the people in Dubuque will get this?” Really? Must it be assumed that everyone who doesn’t live in New York, Chicago, or [insert shiny metropolis here] is both devoid of rational thought and a sense of humor?

In a more thoughtful assessment, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that the image doesn’t go far enough to separate itself from the views it intends to harangue. “My point is that that this cover actually does reflect—not exaggerate, not satirize—the views of a sizeable portion of Americans,” he writes. He points out that some 13 percent of Americans actually think Obama’s a Muslim. It’s a horrifying stat. But consider a few more: Just last summer, 41 percent of Americans still thought Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11. And while 62 percent of Americans believe in the devil, only 42 percent believe in evolution.

Here’s the thing about good humor: Not everyone’s going to get it. Comedy, satire, humor, whatever you want to call it, is absolutely essential to a vital culture of political criticism. If we muzzle our humorists—going so far as to inveigh against those who have the clear intent of lambasting ignorance—than we’re in for a very boring, very unreflective four to eight years if Obama moves into that toasty, Osama-adorned Oval Office.

UPDATE (7/15/2008): Rachel Sklar writes in to note that I missed the reference in her Dubuque line, which was readily available in the link she provided. Point taken: Looks like the gal in Minneapolis didn’t get it. But the connotation, wink or no, remains. Later in her post, Sklar writes, “Presumably the New Yorker readership is sophisticated enough to get the joke” on the magazine's cover, suggesting that most other folks probably aren’t worldly enough to join in on the chuckle. Sklar isn't the poster girl for perpetrating this meme—she’s certainly not alone in it—but it’s there.

Last month, the government of Zimbabwe imposed a “luxury tax” on imported newspapers and magazines, tightening the stronghold of state-controlled media. The move, which has been formally opposed by the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, slaps a 40 percent import duty on all foreign periodicals, which are now classified as “luxury goods.” From WAN's letter to President Robert Mugabe:

The tax appears to be particularly aimed at South African–based news sources, which have been extremely important to Zimbabweans. All domestic independent newspapers and broadcasters in Zimbabwe are banned. The Zimbabwean, a twice-weekly newspaper printed in South Africa for distribution in Zimbabwe, has been forced to pay almost USD 20,000 per week and is reducing its circulation from 200,000 copies to 60,000 as a result.

(Thanks, Editors Weblog.)

Campaign seasons inevitably produce high-pressure systems of willful ignorance, disingenuous oversimplification, and mountain-out-of-molehill overreactions on the part of the media in response to nuanced statements by candidates or their surrogates. This year has been no different; in fact, this election has seen the mainstream media hype machine working overtime—hysterically wringing every last drop out of items whose newsworthiness was dubious from the start—with an intensity that makes the media mileage gained four years ago from the Swift Boat Veterans or Howard Dean’s scream look paltry by comparison.

The Columbia Journalism Review contrasts two recent pieces by Paul Krugman and Matthew Yglesias that analyze the mainstream media’s willful distortion of certain statements—in this case, Krugman and Yglesias consider (with varying degrees of optimism) the longer-term legacy of the media hysteria that erupted over General Wesley Clark's assessment of John McCain's military service.

Krugman believes the era of “Rovian” attack politics is waning, that a contrite press might begin to tone down its “faux outrage over fake scandals.” But Yglesias responds that old habits die hard, and the days of overblown oversimplification aren't likely to end anytime soon: “If Democrats are really counting on responsible, substantive news coverage to hand them the election then John McCain has things in the bag.”

CJR’s own two-part analysis (here and here) of the media uproar surrounding the “Clark fallout” supports this pessimistic outlook. (Also check out the Carpetbagger's thoughts on how the media’s irresponsible treatment of the episode has spilled over into coverage of John Kerry’s recent Face the Nation appearance.)

"Beat blogging" is emerging as an online-media method for gathering public opinion, a web-friendly alternative to the traditional “person on the street” approach long utilized by print journalists. Patrick Thornton at the Journalism Iconoclast describes how, rather than interviewing people for quotes, online reporters can rely on the comments section of each story to supply a potentially unlimited array of opinions from the public.

The old model of quote-gathering required time-consuming phone calls and footwork in search of opinions from “real people.” But online news organs that open their stories to comments can instantly acquire a sampling of views from real people—or at least the ones who populate the internet. Journalists can concentrate on core reporting in their initial stories (the lede, nut graph, and data of a typical newspaper story) then open that information up to readers for corroboration, dispute, and commentary (the body and context). What began as a conventional news story morphs into a dialogue.

Of course, this model isn’t perfect—reader comments represent a diversity of opinion, but only within that segment of the population with the time and motivation to comment on a news story. Furthermore, a theoretically infinite quantity of comments doesn’t guarantee a quality of insight or eloquence. The New York Times quickly discovered the promises and perils of online discussion when it opened some of its stories to reader comments last fall; public editor Clark Hoyt documented what happens when the readership becomes the rabble.

Still, beat blogging has a lot of potential. Thornton elaborates on the idea at Beatblogging.org, a network of 13 online news organizations attempting to harness the news-gathering capabilities of social networking. Their successes and failures in this quest might provide an accurate picture of online journalism’s future.

It’s difficult to break through the white noise of horserace media coverage this election cycle, when stories about lapel-pin patriotism and other frivolous distractions dominate the news headlines. The show Live from Main Street hosted a town hall meeting about how people can make their voices heard in the time before the 2008 election. It was held directly after the National Conference for Media Reform earlier this month, and a few of the highlights can be seen below.

It’s a familiar story—a much-loved alt-weekly buckles under money troubles—but this time it’s happening overseas, with complex political ramifications. The eXile, a sassy English-language biweekly newspaper published for expats in Moscow, has ceased publication; the St. Petersburg Times reports that the paper's investors were spooked after officials from Russia's media bureau paid a visit to the eXile office, announcing plans to inspect the paper's archives for “extremist” content.

At the eXile’s website you can browse the archives, while they still exist, to sample some of the irreverent writing that earned the paper so many friends (and enemies) over the past eleven years, leavening puerile humor with incisive analysis of Russia’s fraught political system. (The cover of the final issue sums up the paper's mission succinctly and characteristically: “In a nation terrorized by its own government, one paper dared to fart in its face.”)

Mother Jones has already delivered a brief eulogy, eXile editor-in-chief Mark Ames is providing regular updates on the paper's fate at Radar, and eXile contributor Sean Guillory analyzes the reasons behind the shutdown on his blog. In the meantime, the eXile is accepting PayPal donations to move its servers to another, friendlier country: no more “.ru” at the end of the domain name; no more politically defiant coverage of Russia as seen through the eyes of Western émigrés.

It’s hard not to miss Molly Ivins, the irreverent journalist credited with (among many other things) demoting George W. Bush to “Shrub.” The Texas Observer created the MOLLY National Journalism Prize in honor of the late Ivins to reward other rabble-rousers and convention-challengers.

The 2008 inaugural MOLLY winner is announced in the current issue of the Observer: It's Diane Suchetka, a reporter with the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, who reported on a 22-year-old working toward his GED in Cleveland's Mount Pleasant neighborhood. 

“Molly would have been tickled that all three winners [Suchetka and both honorable mentions] were women,” the Observer writes.

ProPublica, a new online hub of investigative journalism, launched earlier this week to great media-blog fanfare. From their website:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

They’re just about staffed up and it looks like they’ll post more of their own work as time goes on. In the meantime, ProPublica’s twice-daily roundups of solid public-interest reporting—from mostly mainstream sources, but not exclusively—give me hope for the future of investigative journalism. (See also: the recently launched American News Project.)

For the latest episode of the UtneCast, I sat down with film director Robert Greenwald during the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform to talk about the blurring line between advocacy and journalism.

Greenwald rose to fame with his fiery polemics against Fox News in his 2004 documentary OutFoxed, and private contractors in Iraq in his 2006 documentary Iraq for Sale. Celebrated by many on the left, and reviled by many on the right, Greenwald’s production company, Brave New Films, has focused on the internet in recent months, releasing short films attacking John McCain and his allies.

For more information on the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform, visit the Utne.com media archives from June.

Listen Now:

No surprise here: A report by Media Matters for America found that Maureen Dowd has “frequently characterized” the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates “using gendered language, specifically characterizing Clinton as masculine, and Obama and Edwards as feminine.”

For those of us who preserve our sanity by avoiding her column altogether, the report serves as a helpful reminder to continue doing so.

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

For more head-clutchingly inane evidence of what apparently passes for political analysis at Fox News, I’d like to thank Daily Kos for alerting us to the network’s fair and balanced examination of Barack and Michelle Obama’s now-famous fist-bump last week—or “pound,” as those crazy kids are calling it these days—courtesy of aspiring semiotician E.D. Hill, who introduces the segment by suggesting that the gesture might be a “terrorist fist jab.” She then consults a “body language expert” to shed some light on the meaning behind the bump/thump/pound/jab/terrorist-call-to-arms. Hill’s side of the conversation can be best summarized thusly: “Golly! Who knows the mysterious significance of these bizarre rituals committed by popular culture, with which I am so laughably out of touch!”

Image by  Chad Davis , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

One of the best (and most overwhelming) parts of a conference like this weekend’s Free Press event is the confluence of energized people, all armed with sharp ideas, many working on innovative, exciting projects. On Saturday afternoon, one project making innovative use of radio stood out from the fray:

Thousand Kites , a project of the Appalachia-based arts and education center Appalshop, is “a national dialogue project addressing the criminal justice system” that uses video, theater, radio, and the Internet to help people to share their experiences and motivate reform. Amelia Kirby, the project’s media producer, played several minutes of a radio call-in show for conference attendees during a session on “Connecting with Social Justice Organizations.” Over crackling phone lines, family and friends sent holiday wishes to incarcerated loved ones from whom they were separated.

Before one airing of the show, Kirby explained, they had a caller who was outraged at the premise, offended that they’d be doing such a thing for incarcerated people. After the show aired, Kirby said, the man called again. He had listened to the program. He had changed his mind—he’d never “thought of things this way.”

It reminded me of what Janine Jackson, from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, had said the day before, when someone asked her how media critics might also be activists. Her answer resonated beyond media criticism: To make change, she explained, you don’t have to necessarily change the institution. You just have to change how one person thinks about the institution.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

Over the past few years, as the immigration debate has heated up, a lot of so-called “mainstream” folks have shown up on television and radio stations to espouse anti-immigration perspectives. When their organizational affiliation shows up on the bottom of the screen, it probably doesn’t sound overtly racist: the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and so forth. But as a group of experts discussed at the “Standing Up Against Hate Speech” panel at the National Conference for Media Reform, a teeny bit of digging reveals that many of these talking heads have close ties to hate groups (FAIR was, in fact, recently classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center). But in spite of this, they’re invited back to the airwaves again and again, spreading false information and drumming up fears that immigrants carry diseases, fill our prisons, and drain the economy.

These “commentators” are not experts—they’re extremists. “If the mainstream media was doing its job,” said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, “we wouldn’t see them.” Here’s a quick list of resources to keep track of reality vs. rhetoric, hate group vs. think-tank:

* Truth in Immigration, created by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)

* Intelligence Report, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center

* The Anti-Defamation League’s section on Immigration Reports and Resources

* The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

Big, bold, and occasionally crazy-sounding ideas get thrown around at the National Conference for Media Reform. Abolish the FCC. Take down Fox News. 9/11 was an inside job. But the most out-there notion I’ve heard yet this weekend has to be this: Let’s rewrite the First Amendment.

“The First Amendment is an amendment, meaning it can be amended,” is how community activist Malkia Cyril announced her brainstorm during the well-attended panel titled “From Broadcast to Broadband: The Next Frontier of Media Reform.” Malkia had already admitted that she had forgotten until this morning that she was speaking on the panel, and she spent the first part of her address riffing on the colonial implications of the word “frontier” before dropping her First Amendment bombshell.

The crowd, which had gotten into the habit of politely applauding any remarks regarded as potentially hell-raising, delivered a notably tepid response to this suggestion, though it should be noted that a few people clapped exuberantly. But as Cyril further delineated her idea—something about the First Amendment being the “product of a slaveocracy” that needs to be redefined to include more marginalized groups—it became clear that not only did her suggestion have little to do with the panel’s topic, it had possibly just occurred to her.

Now, I’ve seen Cyril fire up a crowd with well-prepared, impassioned speeches before, and she made some good points even in her off-the-cuff remarks. But of all the many things on the media reform movement’s agenda, taking a bottle of Wite-Out to the first item in the Bill of Rights is way, way off the radar, and I daresay it’s a pretty stupid idea. But of course—thanks to the First Amendment—she’s got a right to speak about it, even in a crowded theater.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

It’s easy to look at the disaster in Iraq, hang your head, and curse Dick Cheney’s soul. Indeed sometimes, especially at lefty fests like this weekend’s National Conference for Media Reform, it seems like all our troubles can be traced back to Dick and his underling George. Blood and Oil, a documentary based on Michael T. Klare’s 2004 book of the same name, makes a strong case for looking beyond Bush & Co. to the roots of the United States’ geopolitical oil mongering. Along the way, it takes aim at some sacred idols of the left, namely Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter.

In 1945, as Roosevelt saw the United States’ self-sufficiency in oil production slipping away, he set out to meet with Saudi Arabia’s king, striking a deal that has survived all administrations since: U.S. protection of the Saudi royal family for proprietary oil development rights. From there, Klare, the defense correspondent for the Nation, traces the evolution of U.S. oil policy through various presidents, reserving a special place for Jimmy Carter, who he says laid the foundation for the doctrine sanctioning the use of military force to protect America’s strategic oil interests in the Middle East. Reagan beefed up that doctrine, and, producer Scott Morris noted in a question-and-answer session after the film, Cheney “blew the policy out of the water.” But it didn’t come out of nowhere, and that’s a valuable lesson as we prepare to write the obituary of the Bush administration and look toward the policies of the next president.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

Writers and bloggers are blurring the already thin line between advocacy and journalism. In a workshop at the National Conference for Media Reform today called “How Independent Media Creates Change,” Jane Hamsher, the founder of the popular blog Firedoglake, spoke about her work as “somewhere between activism and journalism.” She set out to “keep journalists honest” in her acclaimed work during the Scooter Libby trial. Speaking on the same panel, Jefferson Morley of the Center for Independent Media drew a sharp distinction between the two camps, putting himself squarely on the side of journalism.

The question is: Where’s the line? I spoke with Tracy Van Slyke, director of the Media Consortium, and she said that the blurring of advocacy and journalism could be a good thing. She said the mix hearkens back to the original intent of journalism, which is to “inform and to activate” people. At the same time, she stressed that journalists should be transparent about their biases and affiliations. Van Slyke, who directs a network that includes outlets such as In These Times, Air America Radio, and Grist.org, aims to “build the echo” within the progressive media.

There is, however, a danger in building a left-wing echo chamber that Van Slyke acknowledges. As the Democrats begin to take power in Washington, the progressive media can’t sacrifice its role as a watchdog of people in power, regardless of party affiliation. This is where the mix could become problematic, when a journalist’s role as an advocate strains journalistic integrity.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

“As journalism goes, so goes democracy,” renowned PBS host Bill Moyers told the crowd at the National Conference for Media Reform. And right now, journalism is in trouble. In his serious and eloquent style, Moyers warned the crowd of the “mighty armada of power and influence” that threatens the media and democracy today—propagating junk news that dominates the national discussion and forces out more legitimate and competing storylines. 

There is one central tenet that runs through the media reform movement, according to Moyers: Everyone here sees media consolidation as a “corrosive force.” As the wall between journalism and advertising is broken down by businesses pushing profit over public good, honest information and accountability in this country literally disappears. He called out the “myths of the marketplace,” including the idea that private systems will provide for the public good, and the business mantra that public interest is what the public is interested in.

Moyers effortlessly drew connections from the complicity of the media in the war in Iraq to the near-constant attacks on the environment, from the “political marionettes” in Washington, D.C., to the soaring credit card debt and inequality in America today. The way to combat these problems is with media reform, and the only way reform the media is with a healthy and popular movement.

“In numbers is strength, and in strength is success,” Moyers told the crowd of journalists and activists, urging them to support a diversity of voices from all communities. He called on journalists and activists to “be vigilant” and “show courage,” because their job is literally to protect “the freedom that makes all other freedom possible.”

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

And to watch a video of the speech, click on the link below.

With a pivotal presidential election just around the corner, attendance was robust at the panel dubbed "Media and the Elections: Covering 2008" at the National Conference for Media Reform. The discussion didn't produce any silver-bullet solutions for immediate improvement of political coverage, but the panelists offered substantial food for thought as Barack Obama and John McCain head for a November showdown.

The starting point, naturally, was the dismal state of mainstream media election coverage: the off-the-charts obsession with remarks made by Obama's pastor, the Rev. James Wright; the racism and sexism on display in coverage of the Obama and Clinton campaigns; the gaping media blind spots on issues of race, the environment, and unemployment; and the marginalization of third-party and lesser-known candidates. John Nichols, Washington correspondent for the Nation magazine and author of the book Tragedy and Farce, put the problem in stark terms: "We're not just seeing bad media. We're seeing assault and battery on our democracy."

Robert "Biko" Baker, a community activist with the League of Young Voters in Milwaukee, brought a more street-level perspective to the topic, describing the poverty and disenfranchisement of the youth he works with—and the vast distance between them and the talking heads on CNN and Fox. "Corporate America runs the media and will continue to run the media until we stop it," he said before concluding with a clarion call: "The world is in peril. We have to challenge our contradictions."

Sirota, author of The Uprising, added a fresh twist to the discussion. Many of us, he noted, see the media as a monolithic force, and we await the news sent down from "Media Mount Olympus." But that passive role is exactly what has strengthened the role of the "paternalistic" media. "We have the chance to be our own media," he says, and we ought to seize it. For another audience, this might have sounded like a simplistic bromide. But for this crowd, made up largely of indie media activists and advocates, it sounded plausible, and when they filed out of the room, you suspected they might just go out and do it.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

A while back I blogged about a witty British group that’s pushing Parliament to make legislation more technologically accessible to the public with its “Nice, Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21st-Century Way. Please. Now.”

I lamented the lack of such efforts in the United States and longed for tools that would let people easily search and track legislation (no easy task today, as anyone who has rooted around Thomas.gov for legislative information without a public policy degree knows), but also allow citizens the opportunity to provide feedback and help shape the proposed laws that will affect their lives.

Well, apparently there was no need to lament. Turns out there are some innovative, promising stateside websites and online conversations converging to create Legislation 2.0. And I heard all about them at a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform today.

First, there’s Open Congress, a handy project of the Sunlight Foundation and Participatory Politics Foundation that lets you search, track, and comment on legislation. Also check out PublicMarkup.org, another Sunlight effort that goes a step further. The site invited the public to help Sunlight refine their own legislative proposal, the Transparency in Government Act of 2008. They’re culling through the feedback, and a newly revised version of the bill is due out later this month.

“Legislation is essentially an outgrowth of conversation,” said Open Left cofounder and panelist Matt Stoller. “That conversation has been corrupted.” The internet offers a way for citizens to reclaim the dialogue from lobbyists. Stoller offered the real world example of Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s efforts to open an online conversation on how to expand broadband access. Live blogging and an unexpected flurry of feedback ensued, unleashing the thoughts and passions of fired-up, informed constituents. And those are the folks that Senate staffers need to hear from (and be motivated by), said panelist Russell Newman, then a legislative aide for Durbin.

They’re all very encouraging developments in terms of democratizing legislation and shedding some light on the machinations of Congress. Before I go, I’ll just mention one more. It’s not about legislation per se, but rather the wining and dining that gets legislation flowing: This July the Sunlight Foundation will release Party Time, a database of all the D.C. hobnobbing, fundraising parties and the hosts who host them. Should be an interesting new tool for tracking the web of money and influence in Washington.

“Let’s take off the gloves,” moderator Paul Schmelzer of the Minnesota Monitor said to his panelists, an assembly of media critics charged with talking about their changing role in an evolving media landscape. The question: What could they be doing better?

Janine Jackson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) called for more rounded subjects. Critics get mired in deconstructing the coverage of domestic and party politics, she said. Among the areas in which Jackson would like to read more are the disability community, labor news, and feminist and antiracist criticism. She also noted a tendency to focus heavily on print media, neglecting mediums such as radio. “Wherever the influence is, criticism should be,” she stressed.

Eric Deggans of Florida’s St. Petersburg Times noted that media critics don’t criticize themselves very well, that they’re more cautious when approaching their own institutions. Deggens also pointed out the lack of media criticism on TV; he’d like to see the nightly news dissecting media coverage. “[Producers] don’t think viewers are interested,” he said, “but they could get them to be interested.”

Media Matters for America 's Eric Boehlert suggested refraining from personal attacks. It’s a model that’s worked for Media Matters, which keeps its criticism focused on “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” as opposed to demonizing conservative pundits.

Finally, Diane Farsetta, from the Center for Media and Democracy, chimed in with the need to form partnerships with community, university, and other local organizations. If the media is missing a story, or misreporting the information, instead of “becoming an expert in 30 minutes,” make a community connection, she counseled. Then when you deliver your criticism, you can direct the criticized party to an expert source.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

The National Conference for Media Reform kicked off today with a rehash of corporate media’s recent and familiar failures—lapdog reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, the contrived “balanced” coverage of the climate change debate, and the infiltration of Pentagon “message force multipliers” into network and cable news shows, to name a few. 

But as fun as it is to lambaste the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his corporate cronies, this conference isn’t about licking the wounds of the past. Rather, speaker after speaker intoned, it’s about looking to the future, harnessing a building movement for media reform, and ensuring the same mistakes aren’t made again. 

“In this day and age, we want to be good at reaction, but we need to be much better at proaction and vision,” the Ruckus Society’s Adrienne Maree Brown told the crowd gathered for the conference’s opening plenary. To that end, Brown’s group works with disenfranchised communities to empower them as media creators instead of media consumers. Those previously bereft of media outlets, like young people of color, get to tell their own stories—through low-power FM radio, zines, web zines, video blogs, you name it. The idea here, says Brown, is that communication is action.

“We’re very comfortable on the margins, holding it down,” Brown says. It’s time, though, to move beyond the comfort of the choir.

Today’s movement is well poised to do that, according to Lawrence Lessig, renowned Stanford professor, author, and chair of the Creative Commons project. “Now is the time,” he said “that we understand the issues better than they do.” Lessig gives media reformers an eight-year window—during which they’ll grasp new media’s tools better than the legislators brokering media regulation—and in that time the movement has to secure a free and neutral internet.

Lessig’s issue is congressional reform, freeing the mechanics of government from the vice grip of lobbyists and corporate influence through his new organization Change Congress. Media reform, he says, is central to that mission. And there to back him up on that was Keith Ellison, Democratic representative from Minneapolis, who roused the crowd by telling them that their efforts ripple in the halls of Congress, when they make their voices heard.

“Welcome to the beginning of a great movement in our country that is all about the common good.”

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

Cutting through the media spin and hype that has filled this election season, Live From Main Street is hosting a televised town hall meeting this Sunday, June 8 at the Woman’s Club of Minneapolis. Join us and an all-star panel of speakers talking about what stands between the public and the truth, and how to make your voice heard this year.

The event features:
 
Amy Goodman, Host of Democracy Now!
John Nichols, Washington Correspondent for the Nation
Malkia Cyril, Director of The Center for Media Justice
Coleen Rowley, FBI Whistle Blower and 2006 Congressional Candidate
Joel Kramer, Founder of the MinnPost
Paul Schmelzer, Managing Editor of Minnesota Independent
Marlina Gonzalez, Program Director of the Unconvention and Intermedia Arts
And more of your Twin City favorites.
 
This interactive town hall event will be distributed by an unprecedented collaboration of independent media including LinkTV, Free Speech TV, The National Radio Project and many more —come be part of the fun!
 
RSVP for preferred seating here: http://livefrommainstreet.com/content/RSVP

The first 150 guests to arrive will receive a free copy of Amy Goodman's Standing Up To the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times courtesy of Progressive Book Club

DETAILS:

WHEN: Sunday June 8, 2pm (doors open at 1pm)

WHERE: The Woman's Club of Minneapolis
410 Oak Grove Street, Downtown Minneapolis
MAP: http://www.womansclub.org/page/1/contact.jsp

FREE OF CHARGE and open to the public. Seating is limited so please arrive early -doors open at 1pm.
 
RSVP for preferred seating here: http://livefrommainstreet.com/content/RSVP
 
RSVP is not necessary to attend- there will be general admission seating available on the day of the event.
 
Live From Main Street is a project of The Media Consortium. 

A fight has broken out between the Daily Kos and MyDD, two of the most popular blogs in the liberal “Netroots” movement. The founders of the two blogs, Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos), coauthored the book Crashing the Gate back in 2006, and the members of both communities used to play well together. Now, Dana Goldstein reports for the New Republic, the two communities are fighting over bullying, misogyny, and Clinton versus Obama. Armstrong blogged about voting for Clinton, while Moulitsas endorsed Obama. Although the two founders are still friends, Goldstein wonders if the fight could be causing permanent damage to the cohesion of the liberal blogosphere.

Digital technology has advanced to the point where anyone can doctor a photograph. Sometimes it takes a technical expert to tell the difference between a real photo and a fake one. One such expert, Hany Farid writes for the Scientific American about some of the best examples of photo doctoring in the digital age. He also gives some telltale signs of fake photographs, suggesting that sleuths focus on the eyes, the light sources, and the pixels.

Some Photoshop doctoring jobs don’t need an expert to be exposed as a fake. The blog Photoshop Disasters has become a time-wasting favorite on the internet, chronicling some of the worst photo doctoring in the media, including errant limbs, one-legged models, and other human oddities. There are even a few egregious errors from fairly reputable sources. My favorite (seen left) is from Sports Illustrated, where someone seems to have cut off a man’s head. The question is: How did they miss that?

It’s a lament we’ve long heard from cultural scolds: Entertainment these days is just too raunchy. Whatever happened to nice, decent, moral films and television? Whether the halcyon days of wholesome pop culture ever actually existed is debatable, but the CAMIE (Character And Morality In Entertainment) Awards intend to put the brakes on our culture’s collective backslide by recognizing films and shows that, according to the organization’s website, “provide positive role models for building character, overcoming adversity, correcting unwise choices, strengthening families, living moral lives, and solving life’s problems with integrity and perseverance—realizing some lessons of life come with pain and sorrow.”

The 2008 CAMIE awards were held last month, and the winners included such family-friendly films as Miss Potter and Bridge to Terabithia as well as the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s presentation of The Note. (In fact, four of the five nominees in the made-for-TV movie category were produced under the aegis of the Hallmark corporation, which has apparently cornered the wholesome TV-movie market.)

CAMIE is just one component of what Reason’s Greg Beato calls “Hollywood’s Decency Epidemic,” as the mainstream media, particularly big Hollywood studios, are dedicating unprecedented dollars to the sort of G-rated entertainment frequently advocated by religious groups and other conservative culture warriors; one example of this supposed paradigm shift is Fox’s new Christian media division, Fox Faith. But what neither Beato nor CAMIE seem to acknowledge is that money talks nowhere as loudly as in Hollywood, where the major studios collect the lion’s share of their revenue from 17-year-olds who pay to see shoot-em-up blockbusters and teen sex comedies.

All the same, after perusing the entries in CAMIE’s 2008 winners’ circle, this impressionable pop culture blogger is considering expunging the more salacious items on his Netflix queue in favor of more uplifting fare like The Ultimate Gift and Love’s Unending Legacy.

Image of A Fair Puritan by E. Percy Moran licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

Over at Politico, Daniel Libit has assembled a guide to “undisciplined messaging,” the new buzzword for verbal gaffes by the three main presidential contenders. Throughout this year’s seemingly interminable race to the White House, every aside and impromptu remark by the candidates has been pounced upon, dissected by the media with unprecedented scrutiny, and exploded into non-issues that dominate the news cycle, often to the exclusion of any substantive discussion about more important issues like, say, the war in Iraq or the ailing economy. Libit takes us on a tour of this election cycle’s undisciplined messages, from Hillary Clinton’s strange assassination remark to Barack Obama’s offhand “sweetie” to various comments by staffers and surrogates, considering whether each example betrays a more sinister undercurrent of racism or sexism, or is simply a bizarre off-message excursion.

Image by aussiegall, licensed under Creative Commons. 

When auditions were held at the Mall of America for season two of Survivor, I had lots of people telling me I should try out. Being the adventurous type, I gave it some semi-serious thought, but (thankfully) realized that I was not interested in having my foibles displayed on television. I had enough insight into how television is made to recognize that producers encourage participants to behave badly, and that what we see as viewers has been highly edited for the sole purpose of making people come off like jackasses. I, like millions of viewers worldwide, find it highly entertaining.

Fourteen seasons of Survivor later, reality TV shows are more popular than ever. Recently, another round of auditions were held in town, this time for the Style Network’s Split Ends, a show (that I’ve never seen) that uses the common formula of a “swap,” where one stylist trades places with another who is from a dramatically different type of salon, and major drama ensues as the two cultures clash. I know two owners of salons who were asked to audition (but were not chosen), so I got a bit of insight into the process. My salon sources tell me that the salon that was picked had to adhere to strict rules in order to participate. For instance, clients who had appointments for the day of the shoot could not be told in advance that their stylist had been swapped for another. Those who go along with it are not compensated for the inevitably disastrous results. As is usually the case on television, everyone involved signs a release that allows the network to use and reuse the images they shoot in any way they see fit. The clip below shows the woman whose salon was chosen from the local round of auditions. How is she portrayed? The same way every single person who’s ever been on reality TV has been: like a complete psycho jackass.

Now, what on earth did this poor salon owner think would happen? Hasn’t she watched the show? Why do people continue to audition for certain reality TV shows? I ask myself this question every time I find myself watching Wife Swap. Just how is it that participants think they will be portrayed? Do they say to themselves, “I am so special that I will be the first person ever portrayed as an awesome human being?” I can’t seem to wrap my head around it. And so, with little sympathy, I will continue to watch until people check their egos and realize how they are willingly letting themselves be used so that advertisers get the captive audience they want.

There’s no gloomier time in our library than when we peel open the pages of a new arrival eager to dig into dispatches from some obscure cultural front, only to find the equivalent of a death notice. Such was the case when Youth Truth—the “official zine” of Americans for a Society Free from Age Restrictions (ASFAR)—came in the mail last week.

This feisty publication has been a fierce defender of the rights of young people, routinely calling on government and society to afford youth the rights and responsibilities granted more aged citizens. In its pages, one could find disturbing chronicles of censorship in schools, news of “gulag” camps for troubled youth, and insightful breakdowns of health and education policies. That's just to name a few of the issues that, if they are covered by mainstream media at all, rarely include the perspective of those darned kids.

Youth Truth’s parent organization is taking a break from zine publishing to focus on its activism. Editor in chief Susan Wishnetsky announces in the latest issue (Winter 2007-2008): “Youth Truth may return, once ASFAR gets its house in order, but we do not expect to publish any more new issues in 2008.”

Here’s hoping 2009 brings better news.

The Russian media generally comes to Western attention when things are going badly—newspaper offices raided, television stations forcibly nationalized, journalists murdered. Observers wonder whether the Russian media is strong enough, or bold enough, to keep government and businesses accountable by publishing opposition voices and pursuing investigative journalism. But for now the media forecast, according to Eurozine, is tentatively optimistic. “It looks as if the authorities are focusing on fighting opposition activists, for the most part leaving the media be (at least for the time being).” 

It’s also encouraging to note that regional papers do not always pander to the powers that be, even if the national media’s silence is what makes their coverage seem remarkable. “Across the country, even in small, remote towns, local journalists are addressing issues that national television channels stopped covering long ago, and which rarely appear in the national press,” reports Eurozine.

Image by Morten Oddvik, licensed under Creative Commons.

Hoyden About Town, an Australian blog of politics and feminism, recently announced the Top Ten FemmoStroppo Hits for 2007, a collection of what its bloggers have deemed the best feminist/womanist posts of the year. It’s pretty compelling reading—an excellent (and empowering) way to kick off your week. (For those unfamiliar with down-under vocab, the site defines a hoyden as a "woman of saucy, boisterous or carefree behavior.")

For more on the sprawling feminist blogosphere, check out “Feminism 2.0,” from the March-April issue of Utne Reader.

(Thanks, Feministe.)

Those with their fingers (cursors? browsers? aggregators?) on the pulse of the blogosphere, along with regular readers of the New York Times Magazine, are by now probably familiar with—if not already tired of—the online fracas surrounding Emily Gould’s 8,000-word cover story about her meteoric rise to celebrity as a blogger and the complete erasure of whatever boundaries might have once existed between her public and private lives. Whatever your opinion of Gould, her piece, or the entities (ex-boyfriends, former employers, herself) she alternately skewers and exonerates, the piece and resulting online meta-noise illuminate some interesting points about online culture, the current media landscape, and the millennial generation’s tendency to overshare. But if you’re one of those rare souls who have more important things to do than read blogs all day and just need a (relatively) quick gloss, the Huffington Post provides a comprehensive link dump regarding the whole sordid, incestuous affair, while the Columbia Journalism Review offers a concise and cogent analysis that might, if we're lucky, serve as the last word on the brouhaha.

Skin Deep is the latest zine in William P. Tandy’s excellent Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore! series. As befits a Baltimore-based outfit, Smile, Hon zines can lead to cringing or contemplation with themed issues on crime, vermin, and scars. Skin Deep is no exception: It treats tattoos in ink-inspired personal essays, poetry, and sidebars of tattooer interviews that are sometimes amusing, sometimes stomach-turning. 

The zine is full of instructive tidbits about tattoo enthusiasts, including perspectives from a number of tattooed men and women who write about the spiritual significance of their designs. (I always took the Bible’s “your body is a temple” to mean no epidermal ink injections. Not a universal interpretation, apparently.) One tattooed gentleman sports angels and “iconic hands clasped in prayer.” Ian Andrew Erdman went for a bear tattoo, to remind him of strength and helpfulness. “Having been a part of several mission trips,” Erdman writes, “I have witnessed firsthand the good that people can do when they band together to help toward a common goal.” 

Not everyone who gets a tattoo chooses a saintly image, of course. For those seeking a more controversial design, the right tattooer is key. Josh Griffin, a Baltimore Tattoo Museum employee, refuses to do certain designs, like “rebel flags. I don’t care if it’s for the Confederacy or whatever—I don’t mess with that.” Other tattooers are less rigid. “In the end, you have to meet three points,” says tattooer Bill Stevenson. “You have to be over 18, you have to have some money, and you have to want to get tattooed.”

Most of the tattooers want to be seen as craftsmen, not as moral enforcers or even as artists. “They’ll be like, ‘I’m a tattooer, not an artist,’” says Dave Drell of the Baltimore Tattoo Museum. “‘I don’t go home and listen to Vivaldi and drink wine and paint things,’ you know?”

If 55 veterans gathered in the same place, at the same time, prepared to give disarmingly honest testimonies about their on-the-ground experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, would anybody listen?

Because that happened, just a few weeks ago. Vets convened in the Washington, DC area for IVAW’s Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan—and for the most part, mainstream media have either ignored the momentous gathering or relegated coverage to their metro sections, reports Extra!.

Winter Soldier has yet to be mentioned in the  New York Times itself. No major U.S. newspaper has covered the hearings except as a story of local interest; the few stories major U.S. newspapers have published on the event have focused on the participation of local vets (Boston Globe, 3/16/08; Boston Herald, 3/16/08; Newsday, 3/16/08, Buffalo News, 3/16/08).

And you probably didn’t see any Winter Soldier testimonies on television—the major broadcast TV networks (and PBS!) avoided the event altogether—but they’re all available at the IVAW website, organized into panels like “Racism and War: The Dehumanization of the Enemy” and “Divide to Conquer: Gender and Sexuality in the Military.”

—Danielle Maestretti

The transgender narrative is well known, thanks to films like Boys Don’t Cry and Transamerica. But the problem, as Extra! reports in an analysis of transgender coverage over the past few years, is the idea that a single “transgender narrative” exists.

The narrative is by now quite familiar: A somewhat prominent white, middle-to-upper-class man comes out as a transgender woman, her long history of feeling “trapped in the wrong body” is detailed, and her struggles and surgeries are documented, as are the struggles of those around her to understand and embrace her change.

The Extra! report also seizes upon another shortcoming of media attention: that many reporters and television reporters obsess over a person’s “genital status,” reducing their transgender guests to sideshow surgical curiosities. Larry King is a notable perpetrator of such invasive questions—because, he explained to one guest, “we’re all fascinated with what happens.” 

People may be curious, Extra! acknowledges, but “there are very few instances in which someone’s genital status or sex life would actually be pertinent to a news story, and the simple fact of being transgender is not one of them.” Thankfully, some news outlets are beginning to understand that. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times style guides now dictate that reporters should refer to transgender subjects using a person’s preferred name and pronoun, rather than relying on anatomical or biological status.

An excellent ColorLines piece, "Becoming a Black Man," points the way toward better coverage by profiling transgender people within power matrices of gender, race, and class, moving beyond the traditional focus of the the male/female binary.

—Lisa Gulya

Briarpatch magazine sheds its Canadian cocoon to burst into borderless territory—“life beyond the sexual binary”—in its gender-themed March-April issue. Becky Ellis casts off home-schooling stereotypes in a discussion of feminist home-schooling, describing the progressive “community-based” learning style she’s adopted and exploring approaches favored by other progressive home-schoolers. Calvin Sandborn’s essay bombards the reader with a long list of harms traditional masculinity wreaks upon men, provocatively illustrated by Daryl Vocat’s series of found and manipulated Boy Scout drawings. And Chanelle Gallant, founder of the Feminist Porn Awards, sasses about feminism, anti-racism, and porn in a quick Q&A. “I can’t believe that feminism wasted a whole decade fighting about porn instead of fighting about things like child care and reproductive justice,” she says. “I mean, really?”

—Lisa Gulya

Last month, when Viacom’s contract workers and freelancers learned that their benefits were getting the ax, their cause found an unlikely ally: Gawker.com. Perhaps in search of some karmic equilibrium following the revelation of its own questionable labor practices (see Sarah Pumroy’s post on the site’s new pay-per-page-view system), Gawker went to bat for Viacom workers by posting fliers for a Dec. 10 walkout on its website. Gawker—known for its witty, often offensive take on the news—even offered a serious, albeit patently snarky, analysis of the situation, including a look at the ins and outs of freelancing.

In an article for the Nation, Anya Kamenetz discusses Viacom’s reliance on non-union freelancers—who often contribute as much as their salaried counterparts—and the myriad ways the media behemoth maintains its bottom line at their expense. But things may be looking up: A few days after the walkout, Viacom announced additional healthcare options for some workers.

—Morgan Winters

The newspaper corrections page serves as a pointed reminder that those tree-killing bastions of traditional media do occasionally get things wrong. Regret the Error, a website dedicated to following the media’s mistakes, has cobbled together an amusing roundup of some of the best—or worst—errors of the year. Here’s what the site deemed Correction of the Year, from the UK’s Independent Saturday magazine:

Following the portrait of Tony and Cherie Blair published on 21 April in the Independent Saturday magazine, Ms Blair’s representatives have told us that she was friendly with but never had a relationship with Carole Caplin of the type suggested in the article. They want to make it clear, which we are happy to do, that Ms Blair “has never shared a shower with Ms Caplin, was not introduced to spirit guides or primal wrestling by Ms Caplin (or anyone else), and did not have her diary masterminded by Ms Caplin.”

Yowza! More of the gems include typos (the New York Times referred to Pakistan’s capital as Islambad rather than Islamabad), photos with dodgy captions (the Miami Herald identified the president of the Dominican Republic as a drug smuggler), and a clarification from Slate regarding how many lines of cocaine make up an eight ball.

—Brendan Mackie

Failed promises, information so contorted it could be part of a Russian circus, and phony grassroots movements. That’s what unscrupulous PR people use to lie to you! To crown the worst of the worst, the Center for Media and Democracy bestows the dubious honor of its 2007 Falsies Awards, which honor the most egregious instances of “pollution of our information environment.” More than 1,400 people took part in a survey to anoint this year’s winners.

The top prize, the Golden Falsie, was split between the Democratic Party, for sitting on its hands about the Iraq War, and the lobbying group Freedom’s Watch, which has spent the past few months keying up for a war in Iran. The Bronze Falsie was awarded to the baby formula industry, which orchestrated bogus grassroots campaigns to promote the industry’s sacred right to advertise in hospitals. Climate change denialists, FEMA’s faux news conferences, and other purveyors of disinformation were honored as well.  

So what prizes do you give to such, er, dishonored recipients? Well, among other things, the winners get a Groucho Marx mask to hide their true identities. 

—Brendan Mackie

In spite of the violence, intimidation, and emergency-rule restrictions set on the Pakistani media, many citizens within Pakistan are managing to stay connected to the international news. When the government cracked down on TV news, banning cable providers from showing private local and international news, many Pakistanis started looking to other news sources. Writing for BBC News, Syed Shoaib Hasan reports on a fast-growing demand for websites, blogs, and satellite dishes to pick up outside news broadcasts.

The ban, and subsequent scramble to digital, highlights a shift in the way information is disseminated and suppressed. The international blog aggrigating website Global Voices Online has a page devoted to the bloggers in Pakistan piercing through the suppressed media veil. Judging by the number of posts there, the government’s attempt to stanch the flow of information may prove futile. —Morgan Winters

(Thanks, MediaChannel.)     

Next time you read a newly-released, good contemporary novel, buy two. Or three. Then, years later, when the book becomes a modern classic, beloved by generations of literati, you can sell your precious mint-condition first editions and buy yourself nice things. That’s the plan of hypermodern book collectors anyway. Think of it as investing, but for people who know more about William Vollmann than bonds and dividends. (Me, I prefer my stable of hyper-volatile penny stocks. Hello, bankruptcy!) Read more about collecting hypermodern literature in Anne Trubek’s article in Good Magazine.

—Brendan Mackie

Imagine paradise: The nightly news would expand its coverage beyond “This popular brand of soda could be giving YOUR dog cancer—find out which one after the break!” to offer meticulous deconstructions of politicians’ semantics. Imagine that journalists didn’t take press secretaries’ mendacious word choices for granted. Imagine that American newspaper-readers could have the tools to cut through political spin and perfidy. Imagine, if you will, the rhetoric beat.

Brent Cunningham suggests in the Columbia Journalism Review (Nov.-Dec.) that the rhetoric beat would help keep “political discourse as clear and intellectually honest as possible, and to make readers and viewers aware of how the seemingly benign words and phrases they encounter daily are often finely calibrated to influence how they think about ideas.”

Word choice holds a lot of power over the way we think. Politicians exploit this by using “linguistic framing”—consciously choosing just the right phrases to sway the public onto their side of an issue. For example, it makes a significant difference if you talk about Iraq as a sectarian conflict vs. as a civil war, or if you debate a death tax instead of an estate tax. So, if the politicians are busy fine-tuning their language, it might be appropriate for journalists to keep an eye on how they’re doing it. And thus, the rhetoric beat. “[U]nless this bad language is outed, so to speak, it can dominate public discourse on a given subject and preclude the serious consideration of other possibilities,” Cunningham writes.

The rhetoric beat would be useful, no doubt, but would it capture the public’s interest? I’d guess that the bulk of the U.S. newspaper-reading Republic cares less about politicians’ stances on the important issues than they care about last night’s episode of Scrubs. So why would they suddenly step up and get excited about the ultra-wonky field of semantics?

Perhaps I should hold my cynicism: The problem may just lie in Cunningham’s own linguistic frame. Rhetoric beat sounds a bit stolid. How about the blabber beat? That sounds easy enough to swallow.

—Brendan Mackie