The Federal Government or the State Court System?

David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club protests BP in Panama City, Florida

Legal Analysis
by Glynn Wilson

David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club, who recently protested a public forum sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior by wearing duct tape over his mouth since citizens were not allowed to speak like they should have been in a real democratic town hall public hearing, was also party to a stakeholders meeting August 17 with officials from national and local government agencies and environmental groups as well as the British Petroleum corporation.

There were already so many public complaints about the lethargic nature of BP’s response to paying claims to individuals and businesses along the Gulf Coast that the Obama administration stepped in June 15 and seized $20 billion of the oil company’s money, to make sure people receive compensation for losses suffered due to the largest and worst environmental disaster in American history.

By June 16, less than two months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico April 20, killing 11 workers and spreading it’s crude all over the Gulf from the Louisiana marshes to the beaches of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, President Barack Obama appointed Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg to act as the arbitrator to lead an independent team to oversee paying out claims from the new $20 billion escrow fund.

But the question on Underhill’s mind at the August 17 meeting was whether Feinberg could truly be independent and fair if he is being paid by BP. So he tried to get an answer from one of the BP representatives at the meeting, Gary Willis. Clearly there is not much trust of BP on the Gulf Coast, since the company has lied time and time again about the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf, about the use of chemical dispersants, even about who has the power to control access to oiled beaches.

The answer Underhill got from the BP official was “fuzzy,” he said, so he and Casi Callaway of the Mobile Baykeeper did a followup interview with BP public relations representative Sam J. Sacco.

In an e-mail exchange obtained exclusively by The Locust Fork News-Journal, Sacco said: “A question was asked by one of your members at the Aug. 17 COAST meeting as to whether BP was paying the appointed claims administrator, Mr. Feinberg,” Sacco said. “The answer to that question is yes.”

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You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
- English proverb

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
- Mark Twain

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

For the record, I’ve never owned a horse.

I’ve ridden a few, but I still don’t know for sure if this proverb is true.

Although I suspect when John Heywood used the phrase in 1546 he was talking more about people than horses.

You think?

As for Mark Twain’s quote, I agree 100 percent.

My humble sympathies go out to the citizens of the world, the country and the Gulf Coast today, however. I’ve lived on the coast of Alabama and loved it, and in New Orleans, and I feel you. I do.

But I know how hard it is sometimes to actually spend time reading up on a subject before bloviating about it.

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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.

Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”

On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.

Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.

I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.

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Five Years Ago Today, this Web Press was Born to Counter the Fourth Estate

Brooks Boliek

The Boliek house in Takoma Park, Maryland, where this site was started five years ago today…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

THE BUNKER – Five years ago today, I huddled in front of a little apple red iMac computer in a friend’s kitchen in Tacoma Park, Maryland, near Silver Spring. It was there I wrote the very first Sunday column for this alternative, independent news Web site, there in the pouring rain with the jazz down low on the radio.

By that time, George W. Bush had been sworn in for a second term, so we knew he would be with us for another three and a half years. There was not much hope for stopping all the damage he would surely cause in that time, but somebody had to try to warn the public.

There was always the hope of impeachment.

That story never did grow legs, or at least not long enough to ever be considered a real threat to the corporate state pulling Bush’s strings.

As the rain poured with the jazz in the background, I read about the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, and thought of my good friend Spider Martin, who had given up the ghost two years before, also by self-inflicted gunshot wound.

You’ve just about got to be a big picture kind of writer to make sense of moments like that — in an hour or two of reading, thinking and writing. That’s about how long it takes to produce an average newspaper-style column of about a thousand words.

The problem was, everywhere you looked over the Internets on the World Wide Web at that time, there were these things called “blogs” popping up all over the place like mushrooms in a cow pasture after a summer rain.

In the face of that kind of fast-paced change, what was an experienced, real journalist to do in these times, five years after the heralded advent of the new millennium?

There was all this anonymous defamation on some sites; on others, it was mostly self-congratulatory navel-gazing, like reality TV. Ugh!

Could the Free Press and American Democracy survive both Bush — and blogs?

Gawd only knew.

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Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Former New York Times editor and Alabama native Howell Raines popped out of his Pocono Mountains retirement this week to take on Fox News in the editorial section of the Washington Post.

His point was that newspaper reporters should take on Fox News for the biased way the cable network has covered the health care reform debate.

“Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?” Raines asks.

Everything he says is true. It’s just that it comes a bit late in the game, long after Raines himself was in a position to do something about the kind of bad, corporate journalism that was already developing while he was still in it full time.

Some of us on the Web Press have been calling Fox biased and wrong for years.

Where was Raines in this fight when he ran the New York Times as executive editor in 2002 and 2003?

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Toy Boy Troy Shows Up in Public

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Alabama’s unqualified attorney general Troy “Toy Boy” King held a televised news conference in Montgomery today to announce that, even though he claims the legal authority, he will not intervene to stop Gov’nah Bob Riley’s warrantless war on computerized bingo, the biggest threat to the chastity of the state’s citizens since the scourge of whiskey during Prohibition.

According to one of the bloggers at al.com, by sidestepping intervention, King avoids a legal showdown with Riley, a lame duck governor who can’t run for reelection. Yes, that’s the same governor who originally appointed King to fill the attorney general post five years ago, even though King had never seen action in a courtroom as a prosecutor.

The governor and attorney general have grown increasingly antagonistic toward each other on electronic bingo and other issues. Sources say Riley was largely behind rumors that surfaced on the Web and talk radio a couple of years ago that King was a gay Republican hypocrite, in spite of his own war on dildo shops in Montgomery.

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And What You Can Do About It Now

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

During the 1995-96 academic year, I spent most of my time sitting in the Gorgas library at the University of Alabama scanning the New York Times on microfilm and reading stories about the environment along side public opinion polls. I spent a small fortune paying to print those stories for a Master’s thesis looking at how media coverage affects public opinion.

There was no search engine called Google in those early days, and most newspapers had not yet started backing up their stories in online databases such as Lexis-Nexis. So to conduct research, you had to go to the library and pull up old newspapers on microfilm and put change in the machine to print the stories.

The Internet company America Online was just coming on the scene, the Web browser Netscape had just been created, and a conservative convenience store clerk named Matt Drudge had 1,000 subscribers to one of the first e-mail lists. By the fall of 1996, about the time I moved to Milledgeville to teach at Georgia College the year the Olympics came to Atlanta and put up my first Web site, Drudge had started the first “news aggregation” Web site, The Drudge Report.

Bill Clinton was enjoying a great run as president and was reelected in a landslide that fall, in part because the U.S. economy was booming thanks to the dramatic increases in worker productivity due to the personal computer revolution.

Yes, old Bob Dole fell off that stage and didn’t run a great campaign. But a majority of the American people felt the government and the economy were working, so why change? In fact, by the year 1999, the Clinton-Gore administration had wiped out the Reagan budget deficit. Remember the “peace dividend?”

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Technology U
by Glynn Wilson

I’m just going to come right out and say it. I know how to save the press and democracy — and the right to sue in this country.

The question is will the right people listen? Will they listen in time?

For an excellent discussion on where we are, check out this post from David Campbell, a professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom associated with the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies.

Revolutions in the media economy: The context of crisis

Many of the points he makes have already been discussed here, but perhaps people will listen to him.

“The way news and information is reported and delivered to citizens is undergoing profound transformations, especially in the United States and Europe,” he starts out. “In the last 12 months commentary has been rife with claims about ‘the death of newspapers,’ the end of journalism, and the impact this crisis will allegedly have on democratic politics.”

I won’t take the time or space here to summarize all his points. If you are interested in this information, go read his piece and then come back to see how I am going to fill in some gaps he’s missing in answer to the question: “How do we fund the good stuff?”

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“Life’s but a walking shadow…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing…”
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

by Glynn Wilson
Technology U

Do you ever feel the pressure of change in your life?

Do you ever get the feeling that new technology is coming on so fast you can’t keep up?

Do you ever get the feeling that there’s too much information in the world, but that not enough of it is getting into the minds of some of the people you know who need it the most?

If so, you are not alone.

We are living in a time of great technological change, greater than at any time in human history. Feelings of stress and anxiety are inevitable, unless you are just determined to use an analogue phone and avoid cell phones, avoid digital cable or satellite TV, to read an old fashioned daily or weekly newspaper instead of getting your news online.

If you are reading this, you are already taking at least one step into the future. If you know someone who refuses to read on the Web, consider printing this out for them. I am about to tell you something that will help you understand and deal with it all.

The only way I know how to do that is to tell some stories. And the only way I know how to tell a story that informs is to put myself into the story. That is “new journalism,” whether the people who still cling to the corporate PR style of detached newspaper journalism are ready for it or not.

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