Center for Citizen Media

Editor & Publisher: WHCA Chief Says He Did Not Tell Comedian to Back Off Bush and Iraq. The Las Vegas Review-Journal now reports that (Rich) Little claimed he did not plan to even mention Iraq or to attack the president, implying that these were the wishes of the inviters. But Steve Scully, president of the White House Correspondents Association, told E&P Friday that the organization never asked Little to avoid subjects like Iraq or back off criticism of President Bush….

“I cannot be more clear that we never mentioned Iraq, we never gave him any guidelines,” says Scully, who is also a senior producer at C-SPAN. “The only thing we told him is that we want to follow the policy of the Gridiron Dinner, which is ‘singe, don’t burn’.”

Parse this carefully. It’s a non-denial denial from Scully. Plainly, Rich Little got a message, which may have been delivered obliquely but which nonetheless is understandable given its source.

The White House correspondents were embarrassed last year when Stephen Colbert had the temerity to challenge — with biting wit — the arrogance of the Bush administration and the docile non-performance of the press corps that, almost without exception, has served as a secretarial pool instead of watchdogs of the public interest. It makes perfect sense that “go along to get along” correspondents would prefer to return the annual dinner to its let’s-be-buddies role-playing.

Why should we expect anything different?

LA Times: Tribune board’s difficult choice. An offer for Tribune Co. by two Los Angeles billionaires would not require significant cuts at the company’s newspapers, contrary to initial criticism of the debt-heavy proposal, people close to the transaction said Thursday.

This is such transparently empty spin that the reporters should be ashamed to have their bylines over it.

Look. Every single news organization sale in the past several years has included assurances from the new management that there would be little or no staff cuts. Each time — without exception, as far as I can tell — precisely the opposite has happened.

Journalists are normally skeptical people. Yet time and again they publish these bogus assurances, whistling past the graveyard.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Vodaphone display some cojones. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and others have been getting a lot of heat over the past year for colluding with human rights violations and state censorship in countries like China. Fortunately, three of those four companies have found the wherewithal to do more than just duck and cover.

Colleagues of mine at Berkeley and Harvard have been part of the effort, until now behind closed doors, to create a set of principles — which one hopes will morph into legislation — that give the tech companies a way to behave honorably in their dealings with dictators.

Read this release and you’ll see how much progress they’ve made. This is wonderful news.

Over at Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel takes note of a new pay-per-performance system at ZDNet, where writers will be rewarded in part based on how many people read what they write. It raises questions, he observes:

For example, will a blogger favor writing a sensational post that is likely to get more clicks over one that perhaps is less sexy and is based on, say, a press release? News value and clicks often go together, but as we’ve seen on collaborative sites like digg, sensationalist rumors sometimes are more popular.

No kidding. This is one of the flaws of simple popularity, which is not the only measure of quality. (And by looking at the “newspapers” at supermarket checkout stands, we know that some big sales mean zero in terms of quality.)

Like most people with some old-school journalistic values — you know, the ones like thoroughness, accuracy, fairness et al — the pay-for-play system is not my idea of a great plan. Another flaw, besides the questionable equating of value with readership, is that the placement on the page has a lot to do with how many people read something. Bury any story, in print or online, and you’ll just about guarantee that it won’t be well-read.

But the system is in some ways inevitable.

In the 1980s I was on a writers’ mailing list on Compuserve. One of the members, a fine journalist, posted something that has stayed with me ever since. He said (I’m paraphrasing now):

One of these days journalists are going to find out what people actually want to read. And that should scare the hell out of them.

A recent story about acronyms and abbreviations (sorry, it’s behind the Journal’s pay-wall, so I won’t link to it) began:

Do your MP3s get tangled in your BVDs? Have you confused an ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund) with an ETF (Effluent-Treatment Facility)? Do you ever order a QPC (Quarter Pounder with Cheese) by mistake at KFC?

If so, you might want to check in with Mike Molloy, USAF, Ret. On the World Wide Web, he puts out an exponentially expanding dictionary consulted by bureaucrats, translators, doctors, weapons designers and anyone else who needs help decrypting the wide world’s daily output of acronyms. Its HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is www.AcronymFinder.com — AF for short.

That last sentence is FoS (Full of, well, you know). It should have said the site’s URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is www.AcronymFinder.com — a surprising goof from a newspaper that normally covers technology more carefully.

Check out today’s WhattheDuck strip. Unfortunately, there’s some likelihood that at least a few newspapers will do just what he’s sarcastically suggesting.

I’m in Cambridge for my monthly visit to the Berkman Center. Today features a Sunlight Foundation mini-conference where people who are interested in political transparency are comparing notes. (See also Ethan Zuckerman’s great notes; and there’s a Technorati BerkmanSunlight taglist.)

Berkman director John Palfrey observes that amid cynicism about American democracy, this group is working — by sharing more information — to restore some faith. But he asks, how does adding information do this? And he asks about the tension between what individuals (and small teams) can do and collective action; one of the puzzles is how to work individuals but also use the network to best effect, creating greater leverage toward whatever our goals may be.

The political leanings in this room are distinctly from the left, but Sunlight (which is funding one of our projects) is a nonpartisan organization working with people on both sides of the aisle. Would have been great to have some conservatives here…

People in the room are working on an amazing variety of projects around the U.S., including (I’m updating as they speak):

• Connecticut Local Politics, which spurred organized party interest in a local candidate the officials hadn’t heard of. The site has bipartisan authorship. Chris Bigelow, who started the site, says he’s trying to spur conversations across the political divides. How to deal with flame wars? Tried many experiments, including registration and moderation. Clear rules: Don’t insult other posters. There are clear rules.
• Bluegrass Report from Kentucky, where Mark Nicholas, a partisan Democrat, is trying to balance activism and news. The site is widely read, and probes corruption issues the media hasn’t, he says, been dealing with. He’s pursued complaints against people including the chief justice and governor.
• Orange Politics, a multi-author North Carolina site run by Ruby Sinreich, covering Orange County (which includes Chapel Hill). The site is avowed progressive, and has become a power in the region where people seem to have been more engaged with national than local politics. Local papers don’t do a good enough job covering local issues, she says, because they lack context. “These are our neighbors we’re talking about,” she says. There have been issues with comments; authentication is required, and the community pesters people who don’t use real names to ‘fess up. The site covers local hearings, sometimes live-blogging, though it’s primarily an opinion blog.
• Vermont Daily Briefing, a blog by Philip Baruth. He’s worked for Vermont Public Radio, writing satires, and writes fiction. He left VPR to become a soloist in a “truncated” media landscape where the daily papers, TV and radio all do short pieces on politics and politicians. He goes against the “shorter is better” journalistic view, offering character-driven commentary and long interviews.
• Arizona Congress Watch, Stacy Holmstedt’s effort to cover people who aren’t getting covered in an serious way. She aggregates information (using standard search tools) about the members of Congress, looking to a variety of sources. Often, she says, traditional media people pick up items from her — using her site as a tip sheet and making sure that they haven’t missed anything important. “There is an appetite out there for politics,” she says.
• ProgressNowAction, a Colorado site created by Bobby Clark. The idea was to create a place where Colorado progressives could connect and have influence. The site now has 300,000 on its email list, of whom 50,000 are active, he says. The site is a community blog where anyone can register and blog, and create groups to collaborate. There’s a calendar with RSVP capability. One of the first groups featured military veterans. One, a disabled Vietnam vet, emerged as a leader and rebutted, in a video, an advertisement for an incumbent candidate with a “terrible record” on veterans’ issues. The video, posted on YouTube and sent to media and people in the district, generated news stories in the district and offers to put the ad on cable TV in the district. Sustainability is an issue for this and other sites. One way to get people involved more is a clipping service (with a $10 a month donation requested, and they’re looking for sponsors); another is providing tools via the network to push collective action.
• Latinos for Texas, Mario Champion’s effort to create interactive community. The mission is to get people into communities and be active. There are calendars and tags, and help for people to become organizers on their own. The organization has created essentially self-organized phonebanks. “Structure helps people organize themselves.”
• NotOneDamnDime, a site by Jesse Gordon trying to organize a “delayed spending” on Inauguration Day 2005. Lots of press, wide participation (and lots of pushback). Site worked in part because participation was easy (no signup; asking people to “do nothing”; viral spread; widespread belief that antiwar movement was being ignored by traditional media).
• Room Eight, covering New York politics. Gur Tsabar says the site hasn’t gotten the wider audience involved, to show the personal politics of blogging — a major concern. “It’s an entity that speaks to itself,” he says, not speaking well enough to people not already involved in politics. Advice from Gordon: It takes person-to-person, and needs incentive for people to recruit others.
• MapLight, about money and politics in the California legislature. Dan Newman says the site collects two data sets — money given to legislators plus voting records — that hadn’t been put together before. Launched it with California data and will soon launch site for U.S. Congress. Shows example of bottled-water bill, saying bottled water should meet same safety standards as community-provided drinking water. The site shows support by groups for and against the bill, how much they gave on average to legislators who voted for and against, plus timelines and much more. Accountability is the goal.

Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior researcher, talks about connections between actions inside a district and a member’s voting. It’s not just the broad, horizontal issues of national importance where corruption takes root. “Bridges to nowhere” can have everything to do with local people’s influence on politicians they send to Washington. He called local officials in one case (Alaska) and discovered financial links between members and industrial interests, as well as a township commissioner and owners of surrounding land — “a vertically integrated structure” of interests. Another case involving former House Speaker Dennis Hastert found connections between the politician and a freeway interchange, leading to a big profit for Hastert in a land deal. Wherever local issues bump into federal responsibilities, it’s worth checking what the local member of Congress is doing — responding in the community interest or someone else’s interest.

More interesting projects, some of which have already been featured here but all of which are fascinating:

• Open Congress
• Congresspedia
• FedSpending
• Capitol News Connection
• MorePerfect
• Campaigns Wikia
• Metavid
• Front Porch Forum
• The Gentilly Project

Diversity of another sort comes to the table. This group is heavily male and white. We hear from two Connecticut high-school students who explain how irrelevant politics has become to their generation, and to people from minority communities. This remains, and will be for some time, a key issue.

Pro journalists can apply for the heavily subsidized Knight New Media Center Multimedia Training Seminar, to be held in Berkeley in March. Recommended if you qualify.

SF Chronicle: Owner of conservative radio station KSFO demands liberal critic quit using audio clips. Now, bloggers and media freedom advocates are concerned about the legal reaction from Disney/ABC-owned KSFO. Shortly before Christmas, an ABC lawyer demanded that Spocko remove audio clips from his blog on the grounds that Spocko’s posting of KSFO content was illegal. Digital freedom advocates counter that the clips constitute fair use and worry that critical voices could be silenced by corporations threatening legal action for violation of copyright law.

The station’s behavior is obnoxious on so many levels that it’s hard to know which is worse. What Spocko is posting is blatant fair use of the station’s audio, so the copyright argument is at best tendentious.

But the most outrageous part of this is the station’s attempt to stifle speech — given that the station relies on the First Amendment to make its money.

The station and its personnel should be ashamed.

UPDATED

I’m at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, where people from around the U.S. (and in a few cases, from other nations) are talking for three days about how to change American media. Some talented folks are here.

But the activist conference is also notable for what it’s lacking: any serious participation from people not on the political left. This is a conference of, by and for the left wing — and that’s a shame.

The main worry seems to be the notion that big media will throttle good journalism. I know people on the political right who believe the big media have already done so, and they’re also working to foster new kinds of media that some in this ballroom would agree we need.

Many of the topics under discussion would be better served with some serious debate. Instead, I suspect, we’ll have mostly a recitation of the prescriptions for change — many of which, no question, are much-needed — from essentially a single perspective, or permutations from that side. A conference organizer calls it “this movement,” and that sounds right.

So this is a valuable gathering. Too bad the people who also want change but from a different political position aren’t part of it. If they were, this event would be even more interesting.

One of the real heroes of this movement is Bill Moyers, the first speaker, who wryly notes that reform movements have a way of fragmenting. He speaks of the “plantation mentality” that has permeated the nation — and today’s press — creating what Theodore Roosevelt noted was a clash between human and property rights. “Elite plunder” — the capture of wealth by the top “earners” — has become the rule. Is the anti-federalist warning true?
He notes that the resources for solid journalistic work are contracting, that print journalism resources — especially newspapers, the most vital for democracy — are being driven down by Wall Street. Worrying about the loss of real news is not an abstraction, he adds; history proves why it matters to have an independent, robust press challenging the behavior of the powerful.

He cites the sad litany of the media’s pathetic work prior to the invasion of Iraq — “solicitous hand puppets” of the government. Media tell us little about who “wags the system,” he says, and he lampoons the “Poobahs of punditry” like Thomas Friedman who “simply accept that the system is working as it should.”

It’s clear what we have to do when big media won’t: “We have to tell the story ourselves,” Moyers said. And this is what the plantation owners fear most.

It’s not a top down story anymore, he says. It’s a bottom up story, made possible through technology and activist work.

In previous cases of new media, the advertisers took over. Government turned over the keys to the marketers. What happened to radio then happened to television and cable. If we are not careful, he says, it will happen to the Internet.

Can the Net be a plantation? That’s harder, but Moyers points out News Corp.’s buyout of MySpace and Google’s deals with Time Warner and purchase of YouTube.

A media plantation for the 21st Century? What do we do?

Moyers recalls the activists — who included people on the right — successful fight against demolishing media consolidation rules a few years ago. He notes former FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s moves in public life and now in private life, where he’s at a buyout firm investing in media properties.

Even under the old rules consolidation grows. And the current FCC chairman is doing more of the same.

Moyers wrongly cites the recent AT&T case that supposedly guaranteed equal access. He and his allies on this have been conned, sadly, because the broadband carrier beat them with weasel words that will unfortunately guarantee the opposite — and is good only for two years in any case.

He believes the terms of the debate have been changed, which is true. Open access is now on the table in a major way. If it turns into a sound law, it may come out all right.