Sometimes a legal summation can capture a story better on video than any editorial column…

Notice we have the ability to deliver messages in this way on the Web Press.

I am sitting here attempting to watch Toyota defend itself before Congress for it’s dangerous cost-cutting in production that led to massive safety issues with the Japanese auto giant’s cars, and it reminds me of the final episode of Boston Legal. You may remember how the litigation division of Denny Crane’s law firm fought off a takeover by the Chinese. Couldn’t find that episode on YouTube, but this is one of the best closing argument speeches from the show.

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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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Sarah Palin for President and the early release of Eric Rudolph?

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I’ve said it before and I will say it again here today. Sometimes I am profoundly embarrassed to be from Alabama. Today is one of those times.

Why? Because the staff of my hometown newspaper continues to stick its head in the sand and ignore the facts, the truth, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why it is in their fiduciary interests to do so.

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Glynn Wilson

Judge U.W. Clemon criticized The Birmingham News and the Bush Justice Department at The National Press Club

by Glynn Wilson

WASHINGTON, D.C. — One of the most significant problems corrupting American society and politics over the past eight years is finally getting the public spotlight it deserves in the nation’s capital. You can’t run a successful democracy without an honest system of justice that is removed as far as possible from politics, according to a panel of experts who spoke at one of the most venerated institutions in the United States, the National Press Club.

Some of the people who came from as far away as Alaska, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia were a bit disappointed when it was announced that former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers were not able to make it.

But Elliot Mintzberg, chief counsel for oversight investigations of the House Judiciary Committee, who came in Conyers’ place, insisted that all the investigations are continuing full bore into the politicization of the justice system by the Bush White House and Department of Justice — in spite of a certain camp in Washington who would rather “look forward, not back.”

Glynn Wilson

House Judiciary Committee investigator Elliot Mintzberg

He said the investigation into the firings of U.S. attorneys and the improper interference of Bush’s White House staff, including political aide Karl Rove, “is not yet done.”

In response to my direct questions about when Karl Rove will be called to testify and the controversy over whether his testimony will be fully on the record and subject to contempt laws, Mintzberg said a date has been set, but he could not reveal it. He insisted the committee will fully probe Rove on the record in a transcribed deposition that will make him subject to perjury if he lies to Congress. He insisted the deposition will be released to the public when the time comes just like the testimony of other witnesses, including Alabama attorney Jill Simpson’s, who made the trip to Washington for the forum. And he said that might very well lead to public hearings.

Mintzberg said investigations are continuing on several fronts.

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Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Get ready, since I’m only going to say this once.

Due to circumstances that cannot be explained, I took the techno-leap of starting a Facebook page last night.

Judging by my dreams, which I cannot remember, I knew I would wake up regretting it. And that turned out to be the case.

As if life was not frantic enough, with enough Web sites to maintain already, not to mention dealing with blog spam and e-mail comments and everything else one has to do to keep life churning forward.

I had planned on catching Ron Sparks’ announcement for governor in downtown Birmingham today at noon, but instead, here I sit still trying to catch up on the news — and Facebook comments from my already growing list of “friends.”

I was going to head down to the Sheraton Hotel this afternoon to hear E.O. Wilson speak at the biology conference, but there’s also that paying job offer to complete this afternoon.

It is no wonder people embedded in the newspaper business hate blogs and Web sites. There’s no time for news gathering or investigative journalism or even the time and space for enough reflection to write an essay or a feature when the bad change is coming fast and the good change not fast enough and there’s not enough room at the top of my Web browser for enough tabs to view everything I need to see at one time to know what’s really going on in the world.

The thing about the news business is this: News organizations have always competed for peoples’ time. Surveys have shown for years that most working Americans only have like 30 minutes a day to read a newspaper. They may spend five hours watching TV, but only a portion of that is news.

This Facebook monster is just making matters worse. And we thought blogs were bad. I was going to go ahead and set up a Twitter page this weekend too, in a total cave-in to the techno-trend line.

But now I just want to get back out on the road and camp in the mountains off the grid again, like I had the opportunity to do a couple of weeks ago.

Or, I want to build something with my hands, like a fine bird house out of a smooth piece of cedar.

Oh, goddess, where hath time gone, and what will become of us?

Maybe E.O. Wilson would have an answer for that. The last time I talked to him, he bowed out of an invitation to speak at the University of Tennessee due to his “crushing” schedule. And that was in the year 2000, WAY before blogs or Facebook came along and ate more of our time.

How did it come to this? Is the human species just that gullible? Are we doomed to not only repeat our bad history, but to create and perpetuate all kinds of new failures?

If I come up with any answers for anything, you can bet it will be posted here in this Web space, not in Facebook, where a few anonymous computer programmer geeks make all the money. Fuck them!

But we do have much more work to do building the Web Press…

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

We aren’t going to have George W. Bush to kick around anymore after Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. So what’s a liberal-tarian blogger to do?

In our case, that’s an easy question to answer. We will be right here continuing to develop the next evolution in the Web Press and building the infrastructure to replace newspapers as the primary information source for a democratic nation.

It’s probably true that half of our blog archive involves Bush bashing, but it’s also true that it contains a wealth of information about what went down in The Bush Years, and shows how we were on the story warning people long before Bush’s corrupt incompetence led to an implosion of the Republican Party and the historic election of Obama.

Like Obama, we are focused on moving forward, politically and technologically. We will be here for every policy fight we must face to transform this country into something that is sustainable into the future. We recognize that the problems are great and the challenges daunting.

But we are not quite ready just yet to completely let the Bush administration off the hook for the problems they created, most notably on the environmental front — and in the system of justice this country must depend upon to be conducted impartially, if we are to succeed and excel as a free nation. There are people still who should be required to face justice, chief among them Bush’s former political adviser Karl Rove.

At the same time, we are committed to moving this technology ahead by thinking about and building the Web Press of the future, the next iteration in our evolution, so to speak. Call it LocustFork.Net 2.7.

While some newspaper companies have made strides in moving to the Web to replace their nearly obsolete printing presses, many of the old newspaper corporations have just not fostered the culture to ensure we have A PRESS in the future. Make no mistake. There can be no American democracy without a free press.

And it has to be called The Press, not a blog, not only because that is what we are all conditioned to follow, but for legal purposes.

Every legal case that establishes and extends our rights of free speech and press refer to “the press,” which was granted special rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The press does not have to mean — it cannot mean much longer — a printing press using ink and paper.

Our legal structures are not yet fully established to extend our freedoms to the Web Press, which just means that there are many fights ahead before we fully protect these rights.

For starters, the lawyers in the Library of Congress copyright office still have not figured out how to protect a Web publication from theft by print publishers. We often hear about theft from copyrighted print publications by those on the Web, but what about the other way around?

If I break a story here and a newspaper reporter or book publisher takes my reports like they would a wire story and integrate that into what they know and write for print, but fail to give me proper credit and/or compensation, should I not share the same right to sue that they enjoy? Obviously from my experience in the Kitty Kelly lawsuit, that is not the case, yet.

The written word is no longer something that has to be printed out to have value and power. We’ve seen it time and again since the first Web publishers and bloggers came online, but rarely do we see an educated, intelligent conversation about all these changes taking place and how to regulate and deal with them.

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Dear Readers,

As you may know, we have been publishing this “New Journalism” Website since March, 2005. Prior to that, we published a headline Website with columns laid out in the html computer language before blogging software developed to the point of being a practical, manageable publishing system, at Southerner.net, which still exists as one of our sister blogs mostly run out of Arkansas.

We have big plans to continue evolving and our third redesign in a year will be announced soon. There is not a newspaper in existence that ever redesigned itself three times in a year. Those changes usually came around about every five years or so. But the pace of change is at such a breakneck speed now that to keep up, we have to work and work at it to keep abreast of the changes, for way too little money, I might add.

One of the struggles of developing a new media company in these times without a lot of working capital, especially in this region, is to educate people on how to use and support such a Website.

But we have come a long way and I wanted to publish this note to thank you for reading and to tell you about a couple of recent breakthroughs that are helping us to fund our progress.

As you may or may not know, we sold the very first political blog ad in Alabama history just a few days before the Nov. 4 election to the campaign of Deborah Bell Paseur. We had already had some success getting businesses to target our Google ad strip. We have received a number of donations from individuals from all over Alabama as well as from other states. We recently made another breakthrough with the Friends of Don Siegelman, who have now purchased a blog ad to raise money for his legal defense fund.

That blog ad, which is visible on the left, is now circulating far and wide on the Web. It has been picked up by Democrats.com, one of the top traffic blogs in the Liberal Blog Hive. If you have not done so already, click on it and see where it goes, and if you are so inclined, make your donation today.

In case you are still having trouble understanding what a blog is, the way we look at it is this: We are developing what I like to call the Web Press. It is really not all that different from a daily newspaper, only it is published on the Web over the Internet instead of on paper with ink. We tend to use e-mail to promote readership, known as traffic, without telemarketing or hiring someone to give it away in the grocery store : ) We don’t need delivery trucks to bring it to you either, so it costs much less to produce and distribute

And contrary to popular opinion, we do have a print edition of sorts. There are people in a number of communities who print out our stories, make copies, and pass them around to their friends who don’t use computers.

My first experience with this was in early 2004 after I published my version of the Bush-AWOL story, when I got an e-mail message from a woman in New Mexico who said she made a bunch of copies and was passing them out to everyone she knew. The story was picked up by the Washington, D.C., columnist for the Village Voice in New York, and was linked to by more than 800 Websites around that time.

We know for a fact that there are small towns in this state right now where this happens, including one community in Clay, Alabama. I usually have to notify a certain person of a new story on the telephone. They go online and print it out and pass it on.

We know that some people are skeptical of this thing called a blog, and I’ve even received e-mail messages very recently from a couple of people who claimed: “You are just a blogger. You don’t publish anything!”

What? Are these words not published? Just because they are not published with ink on paper doesn’t make them any less valuable, if people read and learn from them.

If you are one of the converted “fans” of this Website now, perhaps it’s time you did one little thing to support it. We are not asking for a subscription price to read it. We don’t even ask people to sign up for a cookie by giving us your personal information. It is totally free, our archives are searchable, acting as a sort of online memory, and will remain up indefinitely.

And hey, we even return your e-mails and phone calls in a timely way : )

Can you say that about many newspaper editors these days?

If you want to support us, and you are a fan of Don Siegelman, click on the blog ad and make a donation today. If you like what we do but don’t want to contribute to Don Siegelman’s legal defense fund, hit the donation button at the top right-hand side of this page. We still need to raise the money to go to Atlanta and cover the appeals hearing scheduled for Dec. 9 in Atlanta.

One way or another, we will be there to get the story. Can you say that about many of the corporate, chain newspapers in Alabama? I challenge anyone, Democrat, Republican, or independent, to compare our coverage of that day to what the Associated Press produces.

Thanks again for reading and for your support.

Editor and Publisher,
Glynn Wilson

Guest Column
by Josh Silver
Executive Director
FreePress.Net

Now that the reality of an Obama presidency is sinking in, I want to give you a sense of what it means for the future of the media.

In a nutshell, if the new president lives up to his campaign promises, we are poised to see an unprecedented transformation of U.S. media.

Unlike George W. Bush, the president-elect is a strong supporter of Net Neutrality and universal, affordable Internet access. He is opposed to further consolidation of media ownership, and he is a friend to public broadcasting. Obama’s election represents a sea change in leadership that allows us to go from playing defense to offense.

These are exciting times.

While Free Press is a tax-deductible, nonpartisan organization that cannot and does not endorse political candidates, we are heartened by our nation’s new direction.

Obama’s election rekindles hope that media reform may finally claim its rightful place in American politics as a bona fide political issue — one whose success is essential to progress on every other issue — from health care to the environment, from financial reform to war and peace.

Free Press has worked tirelessly since our founding five years ago to stop the Bush White House from allowing runaway consolidation of media ownership, from slashing funding for public broadcasting, and from handing over control of the Internet to the largest phone and cable companies. Thanks to your unwavering support and activism, we have succeeded to an extent that few thought possible.

However, as the new president inherits a severe economic crisis, two wars, and myriad other problems, it will be too easy for media reform to get pushed down the to-do list.

For a look at Obama’s important media reform pledges during his campaign, go here.

Our job — your job — is to keep our momentum going and make sure President Obama makes good on his campaign pledges in the face of competing priorities and well-financed lobbyists from the phone, cable, and broadcasting companies.

The future of our economy and our democracy requires that Congress and FCC pass policies that get fast, open, affordable Internet to every home and business in America, urban and rural, rich and poor.

We must foster hard-hitting journalism that holds the powerful accountable and covers the issues that affect you most.

There must be no more consolidation of media ownership, and we must create incentives for more independent local radio, television, and print media.

We must double funding for public media — for PBS and NPR, as well as for community media and other noncommercial outlets, and ensure that public media are protected from undue political influence.

Free Press is building a new and unstoppable coalition of every constituency, company, and organization that uses the Internet — young people, religious organizations, nonprofits, and labor. Together, we can wage and win this looming battle for media that nourish — rather than undermine — our democracy.

We are pulling together the countless millions of Americans who treasure public and independent media to create the political will to dramatically increase funding and distribution of alternative media.

And we are going to fight efforts by the Bush administration to give more handouts to Big Media before they leave office on January 20. Free Press is already mobilizing to block eleventh-hour moves.

Over the next few months, we will have a rare moment of opportunity to turn President-Elect Obama’s pledges for media reform into a reality in the next FCC and Congress.

Together, we will determine whether critical, independent voices will reach living rooms in red states and blue states, East and West, rural and urban.

If we do our job right, we could advance several crucial issues in 2009:

1. A permanent Net Neutrality law
2. Redirecting billions of dollars in the “Universal Service Fund” away from subsidizing telephone service and toward high-speed Internet deployment
3. Laying the groundwork for a major increase in support for public, noncommercial media — the crucial alternative to our failing commercial media system
4. Thanks to overwhelming public opposition, we do not anticipate further efforts by the FCC to let Big Media get bigger.

Tuscaloosa News

Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott

You don’t have to look any further than the list of people and businesses that paid up to $1,500 Tuesday to get to meet privately with former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and incumbent Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — at the third annual Tuscaloosa County Republican Party’s Lincoln-Reagan Dinner — to know who the Republican big-money donors are in Tuscaloosa County, according to Tuscaloosa News reporter, columnist and blogger Tommy Stevenson.

Lott, who represented Mississippi in Congress for 35 years before retiring last year, was the keynote speaker at the banquet in honor of Sessions, who is running for reelection this year against lightly-regarded Democratic state Sen. Vivian Figures, Stevenson reported. Party officials said they sold more than 400 tickets to the dinner at the Bryant Center on the University of Alabama campus and hope that translates into as much as $40,000 to use for local campaigns.

And while individual tickets to the dinner went for a modest $50, you could buy 10 seats at one of the 40 tables for $500, $1,000 or $1,500, depending on how much access you wanted to the once and present senators. The higher priced tickets entitled you and up to nine others to a private reception with Lott and Sessions, complete with photographs with the two men.

The party listed seven “Gold Sponsors,” who contributed the maximum $1,500, eight “Silver Sponsors” who contributed $1,000, and 18 “Friends of the Party,” who paid $500 for a table.

The Gold list: BFGoodrich Tire Co.; Chet Boston; Ernest C. Brock, Jr. M.D.; Fred Hahn; Nucor Steel Tuscaloosa, Inc.; and Ron Turner. The Silver list: Weldon and Delores Cole; Bill Lawley; James, III & P.T. Harrison; Lee Henderson; Mr. and Mrs. Leroy McAbee; Paul Reynolds; Jack Warner; and Jim and Elois Zeanah.

The Friends of the Party were: Alabamians for Luther Strange; Gov. Bob Riley; Kay Ivey; LeGrand Hutchison; Lewis Fitts; Magaria Bobo; McGiffert and Associates, LLC; Morrow Realty; Mr. and Mrs. James Odom Jr.; Mr. and Mrs. John C. Duckworth; Patterson-Comer Law Firm; Randall-Reilly Publishing; Senator Richard Shelby; Spruell and Powell; The Fisher Law Firm, PC; The [Tim] James for Governor [campaign]; Tuscaloosa County Circuit Court Judges; and the Tuscaloosa County Republican Women.

The dinner, which has previously honored Shelby and U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus and two years ago featured former Massachusetts governor and failed presidential-candidate Mitt Romney, attracted a slew of statewide candidates and office holders (Shelby and Riley not included) and is quickly becoming known as one of the must-attend events in political years….

Now I don’t know why Lott is such a big draw for Republicans in Alabama, unless it is his racist past.

I’ve been wanting to revisit Lott’s story lately to demonstrate something for blog readers in Alabama and elsewhere about one of the lessons of Web journalism. This looks like as good a time as any.

Back in 2002, I was living in New Orleans and had stopped chasing a research-tenure track career as a college professor after 9/11 to get back into daily journalism full-time, freelancing. It was a great time and place to freelance, since a lot of national news organizations were interested in New Orleans — but not enough to fund a full-time bureau.

So when news broke in the region, they would call upon a local freelancer like me. For a time I had about all the best freelance contracts and contacts in town, including the Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times and even People magazine.

So when some of the first so-called bloggers started going after Lott for his remarks in support of Senator Strom Thurmond at his 100th-birthday party, the editor of the national desk in New York called me and said, “How fast can you get to Hattiesburg?”

We found out that the papers of William L. Colmer, an old segregationist in Congress, had just been opened up to the public at the University of Southern Mississippi, and no one, not even a research librarian, had been through them yet. Since I had a lot of academic research experience as well as investigative news reporting experience, I got the assignment to go through them first for The New York Times.

And what I found ended up being crucial to ending Lott’s career as Senate Majority Leader. In other words, the bloggers didn’t take Trent Lott down. We did, in the Sunday New York Times.

I wasn’t the only reporter to work on the story, and in those days, the Times rarely gave byline or even tagline credit to freelancers on the national desk.

So the byline went to David Halbfinger, a new, young guy who had been promoted from the New Jersey suburban desk to the Atlanta bureau — and needed all the help he could get covering eight states in the Deep South. But the critical information that must have made Lott’s jaw drop when he read it was from my research at Southern Miss. showing his racist past.

The story ran Sunday, December 15, 2002. Lott stepped down as Majority Leader that Friday, December 20, 2002.

You can read the full story here:

In Lott’s Life, Long Shadows of Segregation

Here’s the key segment. This came out of a much longer e-mail accompanied by faxed documents in the form of what we called a “feed.” It was basically an intel report to the lead correspondent, also copied to the copy editor in charge of the story, partly written like a news story. It included direct quotes for them to pull for the story, like the choice ones from all the letters (see below). There were many more letters. Only a couple of the best ones got used in the paper.

On to Washington

In the spring of 1968, Mr. Lott was named the top assistant to Representative William L. Colmer, an aging Pascagoula Democrat who the year before had become chairman of the House Rules Committee, where he and other Southerners had fought tooth and nail to block enactment of the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960’s.

Mr. Colmer’s papers, stored at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, include Mr. Lott’s analyses of other civil rights measures, including those that outlawed racial covenants in housing transactions and gave enforcement power to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.

Mr. Colmer continued to fight a rear-echelon battle against civil rights laws, urging President Richard M. Nixon to veto as unconstitutional a 1970 extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mr. Colmer, like Nixon, objected to the law’s applicability only to seven Southern states – the same reason Mr. Lott gave years later for voting against a similar extension of the act. But Nixon ignored Mr. Colmer’s advice and signed the extension into law.

Perhaps the most revealing documents in the Colmer papers, which have escaped attention for 30 years, are the numerous letters from his constituents fulminating over the progress of integration in Mississippi. Many were answered by Mr. Lott, either in his own name or over Mr. Colmer’s signature.

One letter, dated Nov. 17, 1969, and marked with Mr. Lott’s initial as its author, is addressed to “My dear Laura,” a woman who agreed with Mr. Colmer’s position against the Voting Rights Act. Mr. Lott laments that like-minded Southerners are simply outvoted, and “cannot stop the enactment of legislation undully favorable to the Negro race any more than we can prevent the Supreme Court from issuing decrees inimical to the Constitution.”

Another letter writer, a Justeen Strange, wrote angrily in July 1969 that “Mississippi is no more, thanks to our politicians, we are slaves to the gorilla race, our proud white race is now in servitude to the NAACP jews and negroes.”

Mr. Lott, above Mr. Colmer’s signature, politely replies that he was “not insulted” by Ms. Strange’s letter. “I was just disappointed that you were not more appreciative of my efforts in behalf of sound government and against the things you complained of.”

Mr. Lott’s entry into the race in 1972 as a Republican came as a surprise to Mississippi Democrats, but was again an astute move politically. The Democratic primary had 12 contestants. Mr. Lott ran unopposed as a Republican. And he had the backing of Mr. Colmer, who arranged for his own financial supporters to throw their weight behind Mr. Lott. Mr. Lott won the seat easily in a Nixon landslide. His first bill in Congress was an anti-busing measure.

Who knows if the Times would even bother to do a story like that if it broke today. We live in a different world now. It would most likely be up to bloggers to tell a story like that today. It was great fun while it lasted. See you later Mr. Lott…

– Glynn Wilson