A Lesson in New Web Journalism and Political Activism

Editor’s Note: In December, 2002, I was on the payroll of The New York Times National Desk operating from my duplex on Plum Street, two blocks from the Carrollton Avenue street car line in New Orleans, Uptown, when the Trent Lott story broke, bringing to an end to the rise in national politics of one of the South’s most prominent, conservative Republican Senators. Much has been made of this case study in the power of the new Web Press to influence both the traditional, national news media — and the direction of politics itself. This is my original contribution to this important story in the history of Web publishing, as well as the academic field of media influence on politics and public opinion. I publish it today because it is time.

“I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”
— Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, Dec. 5, 2002

“On December 20, 2002, after significant controversy following comments regarding Strom Thurmond’s presidential candidacy, Lott resigned as Senate Minority Leader. In December 2007, he resigned from the Senate and became a Washington-based lobbyist.”
– Wikipedia

by Glynn Wilson

On December 5, 2002, about the time Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was making the remarks that would bring him down at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party in Washington, D.C., I was in New Orleans sending an e-mail message to the brand new New York Times correspondent in Atlanta, David Halbfinger, pitching a story on the Alabama Ride to Freedom bus tour planned for January, according to my old Outlook Express e-mail archive. It goes back all the way to the 1990s, and is still on occasion a useful and reliable research tool.

Halbfinger and I never got to do that bus ride story together. But for the next few months, we would work on a number of stories. I also worked with the other more experienced Times correspondent in the South at the time, Jeffrey Gettleman, as well as Rick Bragg and a number of others. If either one of those guys had known what I knew about the history of Civil Rights struggles in the South, perhaps we could have done that bus ride story justice, especially since I was working a lot with photographer Spider Martin at the time. He was sitting on one of the most important collections of photographs from that era at his place atop the mountain in Blount County, Alabama, where I often stayed while working on stories in my home state for the Times and the Christian Science Monitor.

When the Lott story broke, it may not have caused a firestorm of publicity right away. But within only 15 days, Lott was gone and his rising political ambitions went stone cold dead.

Because of my academic research experience as well as the fact that I was one of the reporters who worked the story for the Times — in fact doing critical investigative work that was as important as anything done by the bloggers or television news in the battle — I have my own unique perspective on what went down and what it all means. But in part because I was a free-lance reporter for the Times and was never properly credited for my work on that story, along with many others, the academics in New York who used this story to make a name for themselves ignored my attempts to comment and provide some perspective for their research.

Due to events in my home state these days, with another conservative Republican politician under fire for racially charged remarks, I thought it would be a good time to put this story out there for Google and Facebook — so it does not get lost to history forever.

To me, it is an important lesson for bloggers trying to influence the mass media and public affairs — and for activists who are trying to change the country and the state for the better.

See the full story below…
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“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
- Benjamin Franklin

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
- Paul Newman as Luke, in Cool Hand Luke

“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
- John Muir

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

LITTLE RIVER CANYON – Sitting as quietly and patently as could be expected on such a quick, short trip to the mountain waterfalls around Mentone, Alabama over the weekend, I gazed until I knew the sun would soon disappear from view behind the treetops at one of the Littler River Falls overlooks.

In this preserved idyllic setting, I thought about my Cherokee ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years before the United States of America was a gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye. I thought of the men who killed the Cherokee too, and connected the dots in my mind to understand the modern descendants of those killers.

Is it possible that a grudge could linger from a human gene, and not just pass down from one generation to another through the culture?

I thought about the social and political problems in the world today, chiefly focusing on this country — and my native state.

There in that muted fall beauty, as muddled as the world has become today, my thoughts also turned to the Scotsman John Muir, an early American botanist, one of the first American naturalists and nature writers to roam from the hills of Scotland to New England, through Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately California by way of South America.

Glynn Wilson

Click on the image for a larger view…

Muir never saw this exact spot, and for that he missed one. But he passed through these mountains on the Georgia side as surely as DeSoto. (See map below).

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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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