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…

Background

According to the official media and academic lore on the story, Lott’s initial remarks “caused a certain frisson among the party-goers, (but) they were not picked up in mainstream media reports of the occasion,” according to John Naughton of The (UK) Observer, who write a piece about it under the headline: Power to the bloggers? That’s only half the story.

“The one exception was ABC News, which happened to have an observant young news reporter named Ed O’Keefe at the party,” Naughton wrote. “His organisation ran a small piece about it, but got no reaction. The story effectively died. Life inside the Beltway went on as before, and in the normal course of events Senator Lott would have been re-elected Majority Leader.”

Jay Rosen echoed this theme two days later on an academic blog about the press at New York University. He wrote a post about it on March, 15, 2004, under the headline: The Legend of Trent Lott and the Weblogs.

There was even a Harvard study of this incident in 2005 by the Pew Research Center’s Project on Excellence in Journalism, although the link no longer works, and none of the researchers consulted me.

According to Rosen, “the report does not portray the blogs as lead actor, but as intelligent reactor to an event of neglect (similar to an act of omission) within professional newsrooms, where the story of Lott’s remarks languished and nearly died. The case study is largely about herd thinking in the press, and the illusion that ‘news’ jumps out at everyone simultaneously.”

So what happened between December 5 and December 20 that led to Lott’s resignation? How did this story “grow legs,” as we say in the news business, and lead to Lott stepping down as Majority Leader, and eventually not seeking re-election for another term?

“The answer seems to be that although the Lott story ‘died’ in the mainstream media, it was kept alive in the ‘blogosphere’ – the subculture of online diarists or bloggers which has become the net’s version of Speaker’s Corner,” according to Naughton. “The realisation of this led to a certain amount of smugness or even triumphalism in the blogging community — which includes this columnist.

“‘Look,’ we crowed, ‘this demonstrates the superiority of online discussion vis-à-vis the narrowed agendas of traditional media.’ Traditional media advocates responded by pointing out that it was not bloggers’ outrage but the crescendo of coverage in newspapers and broadcast media that motivated Bush to make his speech throwing Lott to the wolves.”

So who should get the credit for unhorsing Lott?

According to the Harvard study, which Naughton says provides “a realistic picture of how our media ecology is changing and of the emerging symbiotic relationship between mainstream journalism and blogging … the mainstream media did indeed fail to pick up on the Lott story. This was partly because most of the hacks at the party were ‘insiders’, long inured to the prejudices of politicians, but also because traditional media need some way of keeping that kind of story alive. If they can’t raise reactions from other public figures, then they have no justification (other than excessive editorial zeal) for keeping a story going.

“Bloggers, in contrast, labour under no such disadvantage,” Naughton wrote. “They can chew on a bone for as long as they like. The bone was thrown to them by a traditional reporter. But just as bloggers attend to traditional media, reporters read blogs, and it was the persistence of the story in the blogosphere that finally persuaded the big guns of US journalism to reopen it. After that, Lott was doomed.”

What’s the lesson of all this? he asks. “Bloggers and hacks need one another. Sad, but true.”

While all of this is a fairly accurate portrayal of the role of bloggers in the early days of the new technology, it totally ignores the role played at that time by the most important and powerful newspaper in American history. The blogging research is missing critical elements of the story, a story I know very well since my own academic experience involves a number of years researching media effects on politics and public opinion, not to mention three decades of experience as a reporter and writer.

What Mr. Rosen, a college professor with no real experience as a newspaper reporter, and Mr. Naughton, simply an opinion columnist and blogger, don’t seem to understand is how newspapers like the Times actually work. While there was not a massive amount of coverage of the initial remarks made by Lott, that does not mean editors and reporters weren’t looking at the story and preparing to write about it.

Because of the blogs, they just didn’t have time to get the exclusive scoop. But the Times did get the best scoop of all, the one that probably did Lott in. And they got it because of me.

What some bloggers, and some members of the public, don’t seem to understand is that investigative journalism takes a little time. You can’t unseat a corrupt or racist politician with a simple blog post calling for his resignation and a link shared with a few of your closest friends on Facebook. A real journalist has to be employed to dig.

The Role of the Times

My e-mail archives and Web research clearly indicates that the New York Times was already looking into Lott’s past. As events unfolded, Lott’s day-to-day remarks ended up putting the noose around his own head.

The bloggers may have hung the rope on the tree limb, but it was my research for the New York Times that tightened it around his neck.

Since Halbfinger was very new on the job, having been hired to head the Atlanta bureau from the New Jersey suburban desk, executive editor Howell Raines, an Alabama native, approved for national editor Nick Fox to consult with me on the story. Within a couple of days of the Lott comments, I got a tip from the new head of the journalism program at the University of Southern Mississippi, someone I had worked with while pursing a master’s degree and teaching at the University of Alabama.

A blogger didn’t get the tip. I did.

That’s one of the advantages the Times always has in these stories. They get the best tips. A lot of people knew I was free-lancing for the Times, and new I had the chops to nail it.

What my tipster told me was that the date had arrived when Mississippi Congressman William Colmer’s papers were to be opened for public viewing for the first time at the special collections library in Hattiesburg. Lott worked as Colmer’s administrative assistant in the late 1960s and became his heir apparent in Congress in the early 197Os.

When I learned about this, I figured there had to be damning information about Lott’s own racism in the documents, so I e-mailed this tidbit to the national desk. My phone rang within minutes.

“How fast can you get to Hattiesburg?” national editor Nick Fox asked.

“A couple of hours,” I said from New Orleans. “I’m on the way.”

Thinking about what I found in that library and looking back at the documents, since the original copies are still in my possession, sends chills up my spine even today. You don’t get this kind of an opportunity often in a career or a lifetime. (See document links below.)

I spent two days combing through Colmer’s papers, the first researcher to see them. No research librarian had even had a peek into the boxes at that time.

As I uncovered letter after letter from Mississippi constituents complaining about Civil Rights legislation, desegregation and busing — the big political controversies of the time — and the responses from the Congressman’s office, I knew Lott was hung. While he was saying on television that he had never been a racist in his life, he wrote letter after letter to folks in Mississippi agreeing with them on everything about the “Negro” race.

The kicker was, he initialed every letter, even the one’s written under Mr. Colmer’s name, with a big fancy “L” at the top of the page. There could be no mistake about where he stood. The documents proved it.

I knew once the Times got a story out about this on Sunday, Lott would probably have no choice but to step down.

While I was combing through Colmer’s papers in Hattiesburg, Halbfinger joined the protest and media circus in Trent Lott’s driveway on the Gulf Coast in Pascagoula (I spent quite a few days there myself). With my help, Halbfinger wrote a story from there about Lott’s attempt at an apology to keep his job.

Lott Apologizes but Won’t Yield Leadership Post

Asked on Dec. 13 in his home town of Pascagoula, Mississippi about the growing chorus of demands that he step down as Republican leader, Mr. Lott said that no senators had urged him to do so, and that some had called to say they were praying for him and to offer helpful suggestions.

“But, you know, I’m not about to resign for an accusation that I’m something I’m not,” he said.

The senator defended himself against charges of racism…

“Segregation is a stain on our nation’s soul,” Mr. Lott said, reading from a prepared text at an inn near his home here. “There’s no other way to describe it. It represents one of the lowest moments in our nation’s history, and we can never forget that.”

Although Mr. Lott’s remarks drew measured support from other Congressional Republicans, many Democrats called them unconvincing and said he should not become the next majority leader. Leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus continued to call for his censure.

Mr. Lott’s lengthiest mea culpa to date came a day after President Bush rebuked him, saying, “Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive, and it is wrong.”

The Sunday Story That Did Lott In

Even as that story was written and published, there was another story in the works for Sunday. I made copies of all the most important documents in Hattiesburg and circled and underlined all the most important passages — adding my own informative margin notes — and faxed them from my hotel in Hattiesburg to Halbfinger’s hotel in Pascagoula. I e-mailed him my “take” on the story with my analysis of the documents and how they played a role in the story and could and should be used in the paper.

When Halbfinger had time to go through what I sent him, he called me back on the cell phone.

“What do you think, David?” I asked. “Do you think we’ve got something there for a story?”

Halbfinger could hardly contain his laughter.

“Yeah, I think we’ve got something,” he said. “Head on down here to Pascagoula and we’ll get it out for Sunday.”

Below is the story that ran above the fold in the Sunday New York Times under the bylines of David Halbfinger and Jeffrey Gettleman. The decision was made between the correspondents and the editors to use the information from the letters down in the story, in part so Halbfinger and Gettleman would not have to share a byline with me, a free-lancer.

“We almost led with them,” Halbfinger told me on the phone later. The copy editor on the story told me what really happened. Prior to the Jayson Blair scandal, each department at the paper had its own policy on crediting free-lancers. The Science section never gave free-lancers bylines, unless they were a previous staff correspondent. The National Desk only gave credit, in their words to me, “When we could not have gotten the story any other way.”

In this case, I doubt the Times would have gotten that tip or had the personnel to understand library documents as fast as I did, but since they didn’t lead with the information, they conveniently omitted my name.

After checking my files while working on this version of the story, I discovered invoices for more than $1,000 for my work on the story, plus expenses. At the time, I was happy enough with the arrangement not to complain. In retrospect, perhaps I should have fought harder for credit.

While I’m sure Mr. Lott was getting tired of all the Web and TV coverage of this story, not to mention all the people and TV cameras in his driveway and encircling his house across the street from the beach, just imagine the look on his face and the feeling in his gut when the Sunday New York Times was delivered.

We could have made much more of this information if he had not stepped down five days later. There could have been another Sunday story the next week. But this pretty much ended the show for Mr. Lott.

In Lott’s Life, Long Shadows Of Segregation

For an interesting glimpse into Southern racist history, check out some of these documents.

Colmer Letters Responded to by Trent Lott

Readers are complaining about the “mixing” of races at colleges and demanding that protesters be arrested. Lott agrees with them.

Letter One

Letter One: Page Two

Letter Two

Letter Two: Page Two

Letter Three

Letter Three: Page Two

Letter Four

Letter Four: Page Two

Letter Five

Letter Five: Page Two

Letter Six: With Docs

Supporting Documents Showing Colmer’s and Lott’s Opposition to “Mixing” the Races

Document One

Document One: Page Two

More Letters

Letter Seven

Letter Seven: Page Two

Letter Eight

Letter Nine

Letter Nine: Page Two

Letter Ten

Letter Ten: Page Two

Letter Ten: Response

These are from someone calling herself “Justin Strange” of the “Patriotic American Ladies.” It’s an example of early right-wing propaganda, pressuring senators to protect the “gentile white race” from the “genocide” by the “gorilla race.”

Letter Eleven

Letter Eleven: Page Two

Letter Twelve

Lott Does Not Disagree

Letter Twelve: Response

This exchange concerns updates to the Voting Rights Act.

Letter Thirteen

Letter Thirteen: Page Two

Lott does not think African-Americans deserve consideration.

Letter Thirteen: Response

Colmer Press Releases Written by Trent Lott

These show Southern opposition to updates to the Civil Rights Act, and show anti-democratic opposition to political protests, including demands for police and military crack downs on protesters.

Press Release One

Press Release Two

Press Release Two: Page Two

Press Release Three

Press Release Three: Page Two

Read Some of the Articles from the Time for Context

Article One

Article Two

Article Two: Page Two

Article Three

Article Four

Article Four: Page Two

An Example of UPI Wire Story

In case anybody doubts the veracity of my role in this story, here are a couple of the fax notes from me to Halbfinger, followed by the e-mail exchange between me and Nick Fox.

Fax Note One

Fax Note Two

Fax Note Three

E-mail Messages

E-mail from Dec. 12, 2001

“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).

Now I’m no botanist. My learned science is of the social science variety, in communications, political science, public opinion and environmental sociology. Our interests are in the same arena, the world of nature, but our tools and perspectives are quite different. Nevertheless, since part of me is descended from his nature writing, along with others like Henry David Thoreau, I hope to one day trace some of Muir’s footsteps in California.

Today, however, like a composer combining musical forms to create a new music, or an abstract painter looking at a room full of blank canvases, I hold several discrete thoughts in my head simultaneously.

Looking at how the water falls, I try to merge my individual thoughts into a larger whole like drops of water form larger streams, lakes and eventually oceans.

For the water it comes naturally. When ice and snow melts or rain falls, it flows downhill — following the laws of gravity.

The gravity that holds together human thought, however, tends to be drummed up propaganda by those with tons of capital, then transmitted to the people (at least the one’s who pay attention) through the sometimes muddled messages of the mass media, which is bound by more than a century of flawed dogma about how objective knowledge should work. All this moves public opinion like moving fault-lines build mountains, if sometimes the terrain is suspect. Change is slow but sure.

Sometimes a bad idea, a meme or a thought virus, gets so embedded in human culture that trying to imagine the force large enough to erode it seems daunting. Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. used the non-violent protest. Woodward and Bernstein used the newspaper. Muir used magazines and books.

I suspect to get us out of this thought hole we are in today will require the destruction of a few large dams, just to let the mighty rivers of information flow like a tidal wave over humanity.

Truth Will Set You Free

It is said that truth will set us free. The problem is, whose truth?

The alleged fundamental truth of Jesus from 1500 years before the invention of modern science?

The truth of a political hack like Karl Rove?

How about media personalities such as Glenn Beck? Sean Hannity? Rush Limbaugh? Is that really who people are going to choose to believe in the end?

Muir, like a modern day Jesus, had his run ins with the money men trying to take over the temples of nature.

“These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar,” Muir said in his day.

His words spawned a movement that still flows like a river, but one that seems to be drying up.

Millions of people know about him, but just as he lost the battle for Hetch Hetchy Valley to the dam built by San Francisco in 1913, Muir’s legacy is also at risk by men who want to build a dam of bad thought so high it threatens the central question to our very being. This is not just about our way of life. What is at stake is the very survival of our species and the planet that spawned us. I am not making this up and this is no sensational exaggeration.

Muir said there is “no synonym for God … so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening — still all is Beauty!”

This Beauty IS God, in other words, and that beauty is obscured today by a people so distorted by their evolution and socialization into a corrupt, capitalist and yes organized religious culture that they do not have the eyes to see or the ears to hear the warning signs and calls.

There are millions searching for it on the Internets, however, so that is where hope lies.

The hard part is to figure out how to mesh all these thoughts into one abstract yet coherent narrative to somehow communicate with as diverse an audience as possible what the problem is — and what to do about it.

In my own search for the right river of thought to pass down my ideas on the subject, this morning I ran across some thoughts on our predicament from a man the people of my state seem to at least half-way listen to, retired Auburn University professor Wayne Flynt, who says enacting change here “will involve helping ourselves.”

I found Dr. Flynt’s ideas interesting, if limited in scope, but I called him on the phone to line up an interview (which I will conduct in the next few days on video).

What has he learned after speaking to groups across Alabama for years about what is needed for this place to “realize its potential?”

“I have become convinced of three things,” he said. “Alabamians don’t much like change; our historic statewide leadership patterns are badly flawed; and we need new forms of local leadership. Waiting for the old top-down political leadership to solve our problems is futile. If that were going to happen, it would have occurred long ago. Solutions to the big problems — tax, education and constitutional reform — will probably be solved the way they usually are in Alabama, through intervention by federal courts.”

When talking to Dr. Flynt it didn’t take long to figure out he’s not much up on the Internets. I suspect his knowledge of the state of the courts in Alabama is also a tad behind the times, along with his knowledge of the media today. But those are questions best saved for the followup piece.

For today I want to lay down some of the essential building block questions and an answer or two. That involves quoting a few other pretty smart folks.

Change and Character

One of the problems we have is our resistance to change, and our misunderstanding of what it takes to build character — or even whether that is a worthy goal for which civilized society should even strive anymore. Our schools and our newspapers seemed to abandon that mission in my lifetime, in part because of the economic and political takeover of television.

“Change is the only constant,” Heraclitus of Ephesus once wrote. He was a stoic Greek philosopher known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and for establishing the term Logos in Western philosophy as meaning both the source and fundamental order of the Cosmos.

His stoic ideas often involve avoiding indulgence in sensory affections, a skill which, he says, will free a man from the pains and pleasures of the material world. Rationality and clear-mindedness allow one to live in harmony with the logos. This allows one to rise above faulty perceptions of “good” and “bad.” (Try going without TV for awhile. You might learn something).

“Good character is not formed in a week or a month,” he said. “It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.”

IQ and Intelligence

One of our problems is that the masses of people do not have the Intelligence Quotient to think abstractly enough about problems to connect the dots, and the mass media reflecting that for money’s sake have neglected to connect the dots for people. Forget politicians of the left or right. Their job is to boil the world down into little black and white dots to get votes so they can get their share of the pie.

Intelligence, at least according to Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, is measured by a person’s capacity to acquire knowledge (to learn and understand), to apply knowledge (solve problems), and to engage in abstract reasoning.

Psychologists have attempted to measure it for well over a century. While IQ tests may ultimately fail to act as an accurate measure of “intelligence” in its broadest sense, failing to account for emotional intelligence and such, it is safe to say those with an average IQ of 100 or less are never going to learn the lessons and make the right decisions without leadership from those who do have the ability to think abstractly. This has always been true for human survival back to the days when our species traveled as hunting and gathering bands across the African savannah.

Abstract Thinking

Abstract thinking lies in contrast to “concrete thinking,” in which thinking is limited to what’s in front of the face, the “here and now,” like what is said about most subjects on TV (except for the better documentaries and movies you may find there).

In writing, as in painting or any other art, there is a difference between an abstract piece of work and a concrete or “explicit” one.

Newspapers are full of explicit public relations information, and so are many blogs. But rarely do they connect the dots in an abstract way, except every now and then in a Sunday feature or on the editorial page of the paper — or on a Web site like this one.

According to one conception, readily at hand, “The abstract thinker can conceptualize or generalize, understanding that each concept can have multiple meanings. Such thinkers might see patterns beyond the obvious and be able to use patterns or a variety of concrete ideas or clues to solve larger problems.”

Abstract thinking is not only of benefit to people. It literally is essential for survival. From the invention of the wheel to the solar panel, without it homo sapiens would have already perished from this earth like Neanderthal Man. Perhaps his brain was too small for abstract thinking, and that’s why he went extinct?

Sometimes thinking abstractly is referred to as “thinking outside the box.” It allows for richer conceptual understanding.

People exhibit a range of abstract thinking ability, according to the research. Younger children can’t think in abstract terms. It takes time, nurturing, the right food and education to develop a concept of time and the ability to think into the future, as in planning ahead (something that often seems to elude society at large, and certainly the business class that now rule our lives in countless ways. Remember, there was no plan for a massive oil rig blowout in the Gulf. Is it possible that structured, corporate culture prohibits some abstract thinking?).

Not all people develop abstract thinking strengths. Some people lose the ability, like those with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. People with certain learning disabilities have great difficulty conceptualizing beyond a certain point, or have trouble with words that represent ideas rather than things. Injuries to the frontal lobe of the brain have been shown to affects a person’s ability to think abstractly.

The inability to think abstractly causes difficulties when people go to make conceptual decisions, moral judgments or try solving complex problems.

Where We Are

That’s where we are today. We are in a world in the full throws of going through fastest and most dramatic changes in human history, and a large part of the population does not possess the ability to think through the problem abstractly. That’s perhaps why the black and white world painted by former president George W. Bush was popular for a time, and why the tea party movement picked up some steam in the last election cycle.

People are mad as hell, and they have good reason to be. But there is no trusted leader who can show them the correct path. They don’t trust the media either, also for good reason. And that’s too bad, because there was a time in our history when we had a chance to do it better.

Shaping Public Opinion

One of the original muckraking journalists who went through an academic period and ended up being the mainstream media’s biggest mouthpiece with the largest audience ever, Walter Lippmann, wrote an enlightening and critical assessment of functional democratic government in 1922 in book called Public Opinion.

He wrote about the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior, which prevent optimal societal cohesion. He described the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their socio-political and cultural environments, and proposed that people inevitably apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to simplify a complex reality. In other words, we all live to some extent by the “pictures in our heads.”

Changing that picture is difficult, although propagandists have learned to do it by repeating the same slogan over and over again. Like George Orwell’s slogans in the book 1984, “War is peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength,” Republican spinmeisters started a few of their own back in the 1980s that haunt us still. “Tax and spend Democrats,” for example, or “activist (liberal) judges.”

While Lippmann expressed some hope that newspapers could cover science and help educate the people to be good citizens and live together under a democratic republic form of government, he said the function of news is to signal an event, and that signaling, eventually, is a consequence of editorial selection and judgement. That’s how newspaper news, magazines and books in the early 20th century sowed the seeds that established public opinion, he thought. (Don’t forget this was well before widespread use of radio for news, or even the invention of television. The picture is way more complicated now).

In 1925, Lippmann completed a sort of an evolution in his thinking on the subject in another book, The Phantom Public. In it he expresses his lack of faith in the democratic system, arguing that the public exists merely as an illusion, and that the for-profit media could never live up to the task of filling all the gaps in the public’s knowledge.

Picking up on his term “manufacturing consent,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky later used the term to criticize the Western Press.

They first started talking about the problems of “corporate-owned mass media” — print, radio and television. They are first businesses subject to commercial competition for advertising revenue and profit, and their distortion (editorial bias) of news reportage — i.e. what types of news, which items, and how they are reported — is a consequence of the profit motive that requires establishing a stable, profitable business, not necessarily an informed electorate.

What did they recommend?

“Access should include ownership, not merely an occasional program or appearance. We have to start from the bottom. Grassroots organizations have to become more media-oriented and more concerned to reach out to similar groups and beyond. We can’t neglect progressive media either.”

Sitting here watching the water fall over the timeless rocks, I’m wondering if people around here will ever figure out in my lifetime what The Locust Fork News-Journal was created to do. It’s not your average conservative “family” newspaper, to be sure. I like to think we are faster and smarter in our approach. Like those who can hear and see, a few people will get it. Most won’t, unfortunately. But all we really have to do is reach those who matter, the opinion leaders, who can tell everybody else that there is a new journalism around, again.

That and maybe eliminate some of the worst evil doers on the planet, like the one’s who came up with the term “evil doer” in American politics. If you’ve read this far, you probably know who I mean. By “eliminate” I mean with market forces, lawsuits, or war by other means, politics. If that doesn’t work, and if this war on the earth continues, then it might come to mean something else.

In the interest of avenging my ancestors, I’m sitting here wondering: Where is Hawkeye, or Le Longue Carabine, when we need him?

Tear down some social dams people, and let the river of information flow. When a drop becomes an ocean, you will know we have won.

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.

Boston Legal was an American TV legal drama-comedy (dramedy) created by David E. Kelley, which originally ran on ABC from October 3, 2004 to December 8, 2008. A spin-off of the long-running series The Practice, Boston Legal followed the personal and professional exploits of a group of attorneys working at the law firm of Crane, Poole & Schmidt. In its five-year run, it won five Emmy Awards.

Too bad it’s over. It was one of the smartest written, funniest shows on American television that really captured post 9/11 America more realistically than any film or print story could. If you missed it, you can catch the syndicated re-runs here and there on cable.

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?”

A few academics and political gurus were just starting to talk about how personal computers, Internet access and the Web could have a democratizing impact on the country and the world by making information available to more people faster, when Drudge came along and proved it. But it could easily be argued that the defining story of that era did about as much harm as good to the country and the body politic.

Even if you were not paying close attention to the news about politics or technology then for whatever reason, at the very least you most likely know the name Monica Lewinsky and have some vague recollection of a scandal involving a certain sex act with an intern in the White House.

Newsweek magazine had the story, but since the editors decided not to run it, Lewinsky’s friend Linda Tripp, who was secretly taping their conversations, leaked it to Matt Drudge.

While the rest of the mainstream media played catch up and began to cover the story, and Clinton at first denied it, Drudge also broke the story about a certain stain on a blue dress that had not yet been to the cleaners, if you know what I mean, and got himself famous.

He ended up for a time with a radio show and then briefly a TV show on Fox News, but the site itself generated enough traffic and Web ad revenue that Drudge bought a condo in Miami and became the main place online for the conservative, Republican echo chamber. That story set the stage for elevation of dunderhead George W. Bush as president over Vice President Al Gore in 2000.

You know the rest of the story, what happened on 9/11, the creation of the massive Homeland Security Department, the Iraq war, the tax cuts for the rich, and eventually the near collapse of the economy, otherwise known as the Bush recession.

What you may or may not realize is what was going on with the mainstream press in this country as the Web began to wreak havoc on the old fashioned print economy.

Mass circulation daily newspapers had come into their own in the early 20th century and enjoyed an incredible run, even with the advent of radio in the 1920s and television in the 1950s. But conservative newspaper managers, largely funded by corporate advertising, would not realize in time the impact the Web would have on their business model — until the recession of 2007-2008.

While the conservative Drudge got the first major scoop in what some call “cyberspace,” the left began to catch up and gain the upper hand on the Web during the 2004 election cycle with the advent of blogging software. Unfortunately, it was not in time to prevent Bush from winning reelection. But there is no doubt the use of Internet e-mail lists, liberal blogs and the Web itself helped Barack Obama win the presidential election of 2008.

That’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say on CBS News, but there are a number of issues we must still deal with to continue the democratizing influence of the Web. There are still major battles ahead. For starters, as we are seeing in the national health care debate, the influence of mega-corporations is like a giant juggernaut.

In retrospect, perhaps Obama should have sent the Justice Department to break up some of the corporate giants before trying to pass a government health care plan. Just in the past few days, the insurance companies have threatened to raise rates on those who already have insurance if Congress doesn’t do what they want in the bill coming up for a vote today in the U.S. Senate.

Mainstream newspapers now post their content on Websites for people to read, and most of those are still free at least for now, although the debate continues about charging for content. But newspapers, as well as TV news stations, are primarily funded by advertising from the corporate giants, including the oil and power companies such Exxon Mobile and Southern Company, telecommunications companies such as ATnT, drug companies and yes insurance companies.

These corporations and their CEOs enjoyed a heyday with Bush in the White House and amassed wealth like nothing ever seen in the history of the world. There is no doubt that with all their money, they will figure out how to “get their message out.”

On the other side of the debate, the liberal bloggers cannot continue to operate largely for free. To continue influencing public opinion in a positive direction, the economy for the Web Press is going to have to be built.

For the past few months, the Huffington Post has emerged as the hot liberal news site, calling itself “the Internet newspaper.” Big money liberal donors such as George Soros and the Kennedys have thrown money at it. But if you look at the site, it is generating most of its traffic by covering celebrity tabloid news and running think tank-funded writers. They still do not pay many of the free-lancers who publish there, and they have done next to nothing in the way of investigative journalism with the $1.7 million they raised for that purpose.

So other sites are going to have to be developed to fill the void.

While most of this discussion focuses on the national level, the local debate may be just as important.

Due to the plummeting circulation of the daily newspaper in Atlanta, for example, a group of former Journal-Constitution reporters have started up a news site called AtlantaUnfiltered.

The problem we have in Alabama is that the Newhouse chain controls a near monopoly on the news. The al.com Website is made up of the content from the three largest newspapers in the state in Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville. It also houses the student newspaper at UAB, the Alabama Baptist, and even the publisher of the Montgomery Independent allows its content to be housed there, even though the Advent company refuses to share the revenue.

The once famous Anniston Star, one of the few newspapers in the state with a somewhat liberal editor and publisher, still charges to read the site, which means it is limiting itself to a local audience and will have no influence on the future direction of politics and public policy in this state.

The Montgomery Advertiser is a mere shadow of its former self, and the New York Times regional newspapers in Tuscaloosa and Gadsden are also in serious circulation decline. The New York Times company recently sold the paper in Florence to the publisher of the Decatur Daily, so the Shelton family will probably continue to turn a profit for awhile longer, even though they have done next to nothing to figure out the economy of the Web Press.

It is my educated opinion that most newspapers will never get past the ink, paper and delivery truck economic model and figure out the Web economy, so new news organizations will have to be built to replace them. That’s one of the reasons I started the Locust Fork News-Journal four and a half years ago, to start experimenting with how to do this. It is still a work in progress.

Think about this. The Web has the potential of a global audience. But you can’t build national and international traffic by spending more time covering local news and sports and by forcing people to sign up to read your site. It just won’t work. That’s why I have kept my site open and free and focused more on national news.

Where is the funding going to come from for this new Web Press? A logical first place to look is the profession that tends to be on the other side of the corporations in courtroom fights, trial lawyers. The mainstream media has been no friend to liberal trial lawyers for many years anyway. When the Birmingham News uses the term trial lawyer, they mean it as a slur.

It has long been my belief that newspapers took the wrong approach when Drudge came on the scene, about the same time Rush Limbaugh got rich and famous slurring the New York Times on the radio as “liberal.” I’m working on a film to explain how the definition of objectivity got screwed up in the American news media, so I won’t go into that diatribe here today.

My message today is for the lawyers, who have seen their business dry up in Alabama because Karl Rove slandered their profession and turned the Alabama Supreme Court Republican.

They should have done more to counter the lies back in the 1990s, but they were limited by restrictions on advertising. So the strategy was to funnel millions of dollars to Democratic Party candidates to run advertisements on TV, and in most cases, those ads were ineffective. Why? Because they went to fund the same corporate media that disdained their profession in the first place, and failed to cover the news adequately. And I don’t mean “fair and balanced.”

Look at local television news today. If they are not talking about the same old recipes and high school football, they are covering the latest crack shooting or fire. Coverage of public affairs is limited to what they read in the local newspapers, which has a decidedly conservative slant.

Even public television has been gutted in recent years, and public radio mostly covers national news. So where do local candidates turn to get the word out? Blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook.

But the blogs that have developed in Alabama are still largely un-funded affairs run by people who are not trained in journalism or political science, and the only people making any money on Facebook are the programmers who wrote the code for the software.

Since I joined Facebook six months ago, I have been amazed to watch how just about everybody is a modern day Matt Drudge. A number of my 400 Facebook “friends” are chasing headlines just like Drudge, competing with each other to be the first to “share” them with their friends.

While this is all well and good, and shows that at least some people are keeping up with the news and public affairs, it is not sustainable. Why? Because unless we find a way to fund the actual field work of journalism, there won’t be anything to link to or share for long — except corporate funded news.

I am in talks right now with some folks who are beginning to understand these trends and who have the resources to do something about them. While individual contributions will continue to play an important role, I believe the Web Press will get some of the funding it needs from image advertising to counter the corporate lies that have permeated our culture for too long now. Stay tuned…

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.

The most obvious possible reason is that the publishers are so conservative and in league with big business interests that the staffers just know which side their bread is buttered on. They want to keep their safe little jobs as long as possible before the entire print publishing business collapses.

The other possible reason is that when you work for a print newspaper, it is easy to just ignore all the information out there on the Web that contradicts your limited world view.

I don’t know for sure what motivates the Birmingham News editorial page editor or his staff, but I doubt they really are as ignorant of the facts as their work often appears. Maybe they just know a majority of the people of Alabama are undereducated, religious conservatives, so they pander to that to try to stay in business.

But they must know that conservative Republicans don’t read newspapers anyway. They get their information from Fox News and talk radio.

The decline in circulation for newspapers probably has as much to do with managers going after the wrong audience as anything else. Research shows that older, more liberal people are more apt to read a newspaper — but not a newspaper that ignores their point of view.

I don’t often link to the Newhouse press in Alabama’s Website, al.com, because I usually find their coverage seriously lacking. But for the smart, elite Web audience in this state out there working to try and get Alabama to rise up and get beyond its ignorant, racist past, you need to see and read this nonsense to believe it. You need to rise up and protest it if you want to create a better media and a more informed electorate here.

This is some of the most smarmy, ignorant newspaper editorial writing in the country.

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy continue fighting…

It leaves me wondering what the Birmingham Noose will come up with next. Will they endorse Sarah Palin for president? Or, since they are such a “pro-life newspaper,” why don’t they just come on out and champion the early release of abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph? He would seem to be their natural hero.

Now I have work to do for an investigative piece I’m working on for The Huffington Post this week. But if you are a liberal, progressive, Democrat or independent in this state with a college education, and you pay for a subscription to this right-wing rag or their sister papers in Huntsville or Mobile, why don’t you call them up and demand that they start balancing their coverage — or cancel your subscription.