Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Rush Limbaugh Blames Obama

Sometimes you feel like exposing a nut…

Keith Olbermann and Eugene Robinson expose Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh as the real evil, racist ones. Does anybody really listen to them anymore?

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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What happened to coverage of the TVA spill in Tennessee and the coal ash waste in Alabama’s Black Belt?

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Coming up this Sunday, CBS’s “60 Minutes” will air a long anticipated show on coal ash, a byproduct of coal power plants. But according to the advance blurb, the story will focus on how coal ash is recycled in dozens of ways and used in consumer products like carpet for schools.

How safe are these products? Lesley Stahl talks to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.

For mo-better coverage, check out our previous stories on one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.

TVA to Begin Coal Ash Spill Cleanup

TVA Dumps Toxic Coal Ash in Poor Alabama Town

Filmmaker Ken Burns has shaped some of the most celebrated documentaries ever made, according to this interview on PBS.

His credits include Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness, the 15-hour miniseries The War and the landmark The Civil War, which earned two Emmys and was the highest-rated miniseries in the history of public television.

At age 22, the Brooklyn native formed Florentine Films after earning his B.A. at Hampshire College. His latest project is the six-part documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which premiers this month on PBS.

See the interview online

Excerpts

Burns: It’s not a travelogue; it’s not a nature film, though there’s great stuff of nature. It’s about ideas and individuals. It’s about stories. And I think that’s what makes it different from other things about the national parks. It’s not even a recommendation of which lodge or inn to stay at.

Tavis: Well, you are one of the great storytellers, as I said a moment ago, so I know that Americans and folk around the world are going to appreciate seeing the kind of stories that you bring to life.

Let me start with the obvious beginning, at least for me, which is this title – “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” I know there’s going to be some conversation kicking up just around that subtitle – America’s best idea, Mr. Burns?

Burns: Yeah, well, we kick it up in our film in the first few minutes. We steal this from the historian and writer Wallace Stegner, who said it’s the best idea we’ve ever had, and immediately someone comes on and says, “It’s not the best idea. The best idea comes from Thomas Jefferson when all men are created equal.” And that’s, of course, right.

But once you set a country in motion with those ideals, at least, ahead of you, because we know Mr. Jefferson meant all White men of property, free of debt, when he wrote that, and didn’t see the contradictions and didn’t see the hypocrisy in the fact that as he wrote those words he owned 100 human beings, but if you set in motion a country dedicated to that you’d be hard-pressed to find a better idea, or at least an expression.

We like to think that the national parks are the expression of the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape, because for the first time in human history land was set aside not for kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everybody and for all time. It’s an utterly democratic impulse and it comes out of opportunities, fresh opportunities here on this at least apparently virgin continent that we’ve inherited, this Garden of Eden that Thomas Jefferson himself thought would take hundreds of generations to fill up.

But very quickly, four or five, we’ve filled it up and we’re in danger of not only losing everyplace but losing the animals occupying those places. So somebody goes against the acquisitive and extractive and some would say rapacious interests of progress and says, wait, let’s save these places. It’s not enough to look at every river and think dam, it’s not enough to look at every beautiful stand of trees and thing board feet, to look at every beautiful canyon and wonder what minerals can be extracted from it.

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Technology U
by Glynn Wilson

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

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

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

Revolutions in the media economy: The context of crisis

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

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

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

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White House Environment Official Under ‘Vicious Attack’ Resigns

Believing that they are on a roll after a month of the most ignorant display of right-wing racism in the history of the nation, at least since color TV was invented, the far right lynch mob was at it again this past week in an effort to slander a top environmental official with the Obama White House out of his government position.

The White House environmental adviser Van Jones, under fire from Fox News’s off-the-deep-end pundit Glenn Beck, resigned this weekend, saying he “understood that he was going to get in the way” of President Barack Obama’s agenda, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Sunday.

Jones, who specialized in environmentally friendly “green jobs” with the White House Council on Environmental Quality, was accused of making “inflammatory statements” well before he joined the administration. He said he decided to resign after enduring what he called a “vicious smear campaign.”

The resignation was disclosed without advance notice by the White House in a dead-of-the-night e-mail on a holiday weekend.

Why did this Van Jones get axed? According to Wonkette, “because wingnuts were angry,” because OMG, he called Republicans “assholes!”

Which of course is true, for the most part. But the truth never stopped a lynch mob before.

Well before he joined the administration, he had also signed onto the idea of an investigation of what really happened on September 11, 2001, which sounds like a pretty good idea to us.

A reader who knows Van Jones, Jan Coleman of California, said she rarely writes editorial comments, especially “not about things political,” but she gave her permission to publish these comments here.

“I feel I MUST,” she said, “as I am outraged at the lies, bullying tactics, racism, and badgering that caused Van Jones to resign his position on the Environmental team in the Obama administration.”

“Anyone who knows Van knows him to be a brilliant young man, grounded in protecting the good and the rights of all, a visionary, someone who challenged the not-always-so-invisible boundaries created between races and economic classes, a born leader often seen as a young Obama, a mediator on important issues, a man of integrity and creative thinking who is destined to accomplish great things on behalf of all of us,” she said. “To watch the organized campaign against him expressed with such hatred, militant anger, racist and slanderous remarks by those on the Far Right — and those in the media who are fanning such flames — is sickening to anyone who has a conscience.

“The same tactics, propogated by lies and innuendoes, are being directed against Obama, his family and those supporting him,” she continued. “Personally, I have not in my lifetime ever seen or felt such evil, organized ‘no holds barred’ political warfare in this country. The hatred is blatant — take a look at some of the signs being held by crowd members at rallies and Obama appearances.

“Where does it stop? And what do we do to change it? My frustration is in my not knowing,” she said. “I am reminded that Albert Einstein wrote” ‘The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who won’t do anything about it.’”

Carl Pope, Sierra Club executive director:
blamed the incident on the activist progressive community.

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