Emergency NY Tech Meetup Advance Story

by Glynn Wilson

You’ve got to love it when the public gets involved in the Democratic process.

Thousands of Websites and who knows how many tens of thousands of people who get their news through the Internet took a day off Wednesday to protest two bills making their way through Congress without enough reasoned debate or time and effort to educate the public.

According to The Hill newspaper, a source for news we trust and use on a regular basis, it was “an unprecedented display of political muscle,” a day when thousands of Websites “went dark” to protest two Internet piracy bills, the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect IP Act.

The protests got the attention of Web users, and could get a real debate going on in this country on how we use this new technology to educate the public.

The term “SOPA” and “SOPA blackout” were among the top 10 trending search terms on Google, and a black image with white text saying “STOP SOPA” was all over Facebook, which declined to join the blackout but posted a page on its D.C. site calling the bills “not the right solution” because of the “collateral damage they would cause to the Internet.”

While the world’s most popular search engine Google was still available on the Web, the company pasted a black box standing for censorship over its iconic logo. If you click on the box it re-directs you to a petition urging Congress to kill the legislation targeting online piracy, claiming the bills would “censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American businesses.”

Wikipedia, the sixth most popular Website in the world, shut down its English site, posting in its place a black page carrying the headline: “Imagine a world without free knowledge.” It is an ominous warning that the legislation “could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” There you can add your zip code and contact your representatives and senators to express your views.

The legislation, if passed and signed by the president, would allow the Justice Department and copyright holders to demand that search engines delete links to sites deemed to be “dedicated” to copyright infringement, according to The Hill, although my sources in Washington say the bill will not impact sites in the United States, only abroad. Ad networks and payment processors would be prohibited from doing business with the overseas sites.

Consumer groups and Web companies warn the bills would stifle innovation and censor free speech, saying they would impose an unreasonable burden on Websites to police user-generated content and could lead to legitimate sites getting shut down and put out of business.

The protests are designed to stop the drastic legislation in its tracks. The action was already having an impact on Wednesday as some members of Congress started changing their positions in the face of phone and e-mail contact from their constituents, and threats to withdraw funding from campaign donors.

A Florida Senator and a rising star in the Republican Party, Sen. Marco Rubio, dropped his support for the bill and said lawmakers should take the time to craft new legislation that addresses the concerns “raised by all sides.”

“I have been a co-sponsor of the PROTECT IP Act because I believe it’s important to protect American ingenuity, ideas and jobs from being stolen through Internet piracy, much of it occurring overseas through rogue websites in China,” Rubio said in Facebook post. “As a senator from Florida, a state with a large presence of artists, creators and businesses connected to the creation of intellectual property, I have a strong interest in stopping online piracy that costs Florida jobs. However, we must do this while simultaneously promoting an open, dynamic Internet environment that is ripe for innovation and promotes new technologies.”

Six Republican senators wrote Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada urging him to postpone a vote on the legislation, but he vowed to bring it up for a vote anyway.

“We have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights,” Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said in the letter.

Wired, a technology magazine, joined the blackout along with Craigslist, Mozilla, MoveOn.org, Alternet.org, etc.

ANALYSIS

According to Birmingham, Alabama native Brooks Boliek, who has covered the online piracy issue for many years and now writes for Politico, both bills moving through Congress are a “drastic overreach” fueled by the impact of big money on politics in the nation’s capital.

While no news organization is covering what the Associated Press thinks about this bill, which could affect smaller news sites like this one as the wire service continues its aggressive campaign to protect the print newspaper industry against bloggers, the real battle here is between the network consumer electronics industry and the big content providers, which spend a massive amount of money lobbying Congress to try and stop movie and music piracy of American intellectual property in China, Russia and even Europe.

“This is not going to shut down Wikipedia. The problem is,” Boliek said, that lobbying outfits such as the Motion Picture Association of America have won so many battles over the online providers the past few years that they are engaging in an all out fight “to get a scalp for their belt.”

Like a lot of issues related to new technology, there are two sides to the story, and the general public doesn’t really have enough time or information to make an intelligent decision about what side to take.

On one hand, the U.S. government has been putting pressure on China and other countries to stop shutting down news and protest Websites, but on the other, they have been trying to shut down companies in China and other countries that steal and illegally sell pirated copies of movies and music CDs, for example.

OUR EDITORIAL POSITION

While our editorial position takes sides with the protesters for slowing down this legislation so we can have more of a debate about what U.S. policy should be on these complicated issues, we also support the rights of movie producers, musicians, photographers, videographers, journalists and others to preserve their copyright rights to original content, to intellectual property.

We recently engaged in a battle to protect a piece of our own original intellectual property, for example, when Facebook users went about stealing willy-nilly our original, copyrighted image of Alabama football coach Nick Saban. Even a bunch of people who claimed to be Christians thought it was their right to steal the image for their Facebook pages after Alabama won the national college football championship over LSU.

This is a very real problem and the public needs to get itself educated on these issues so we can strike a balance between online First Amendment freedoms of free speech and press verses the rights of artists, musicians, photographers, journalists and print and Web publishers to make a living using the Web Press.

If we are going to make a difference here, we are going to have to preserve the ability to create an economy to support our rights so that people who actually know what they are talking about can get paid to engage in this business. Individuals and groups who think “citizen journalists,” anonymous bloggers or people stealing and sharing media content with Social Networking is the answer to furthering democratic ideals are just mistaken in their beliefs, in our view.

The type and quality of information people get on these issues is absolutely critical to forming the right policies as we move forward in the Internet Age. Inaccurate information put out too speedily by people who have no education, experience or other basis to be trusted for news judgement does more harm than good.

We have already been through crisis after crisis when cable television news often did just that — jump to hasty conclusions about stories before any facts are actually reported. Is this roller-coaster just going to get faster and faster on the Web? You bet. If you want to die of an overdose of adrenaline, remapping your brain to the point where you can’t think straight at all, be my guest.

Here we are going to continue to demand a certain standard of excellence in the interest of business, media and government success.

Here’s how a definition gone wrong can lead to a debilitating public controversy. But hey, controversy drives traffic, so what the heck, right?

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

It’s been a long time, but the New York Times is back in the business of pumping up the traffic to its Website with news about itself.

Predictably, once again, it is doing the news organization’s reputation more harm than good in the long run. Will they ever learn from their own history? The documents are right there under their noses.

The problem is, it might cost them a massive amount of corporate advertising to tell the truth, and they would lose a few Republican readers in the process.

An explanation is in order. You came to the right place for this one.

On January 12, the new public editor at the Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, ran a column under the headline: Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

That was followed up pretty quickly by a scathing piece in the UK Guardian under the headline: The New York Times public editor’s very public utterance.

The lede?

‘Should the Times be a Truth Vigilante?’ asked Arthur Brisbane. ‘Yes,’ came the resounding reply.

In Brisbane’s column, he said he was looking for reader input “on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

Duh, right?

He cited an article on the Supreme Court in which a court spokeswoman said Justice Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. A Times reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood.”

The other example cited came from the Republican campaign trail, where Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Times columnist Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

In the Guardian piece, a couple of readers’ responses are quoted:

“Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB.”

“If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, then by all means continue to do nothing more than paraphrase those press releases.”

“I hope you can help me, Mr Brisbane, because I’m an editor, currently unemployed: is fecklessness now a job requirement?”

You should look up the meaning of fecklessness, because apparently, it is and has long been a news business job requirement, precisely because of the argument about objectivity I am about to make in the end.

But wait, there’s more.

According to the Guardian, Brisbane had clearly not been expecting this excoriating and one-sided a reaction. He has since tried to clarify his views.

“What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing. I was hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question.”

“My inquiry related to whether the Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut ‘facts’ that are offered by newsmakers when those ‘facts’ are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.”

My response is don’t report it if you know it’s false. So what if you get beat on the story by Fox News? They have a million viewers. You have a million readers. It will all come out in the wash.

But according to the Guardian, which just had to get in on the traffic boom too, “This only added fuel to the fire.”

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post had a new, young liberal blogger weigh in.

What are newspapers for?

Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times public editor, has posted a remarkable piece that’s generating attention on Twitter, because it gets at a core question: What is the role of newspapers in a political world that’s awash in distortions and lies?

Greg Sargent points out that the Times itself amplified Romney’s false assertion about Obama three times without any rebuttal. And he concludes that “any Times customer reading them comes away misled. He or she is left with the mistaken impression that Obama may have, in fact, apologized for America, when he never did any such thing … in all those three cases, the Times helped the GOP candidate mislead its own readers — with an assertion that has become absolutely central to the Republican case against Obama. Whatever the practical difficulties of changing this, surely we can all agree that this is not a role newspapers should be playing, particularly at a time when voters are choosing their next president.”

The American Journalism Review has also weighed in on this in a piece under the headline: Real Time Fact-Checking.

All of this controversy caused Mr. Brisbane to come back with another post, in which he laments that his piece “generated way more heat than light.”

Here’s the Light

As my regular readers will recognize, this is a long-standing theme of this Web publication. I recently addressed the key question here in this piece: Rethinking Objectivity in American Journalism.

This is exactly the core problem we face not only in the news business in this country, but in the constant struggle to even attempt to have a coherent, informed public dialogue about politics, public policy or anything else. And here the guy who is in a position to potentially shed some serious light on the question is totally ignorant of the early history of the New York Times for which he writes, even though he has the prerequisite degree from Harvard to get hired by the paper.

It’s not his fault. Apparently there’s no one at the Times who actually knows what the term “objective journalism” was supposed to mean, because during the last half of the 20th century, the original meaning was lost and it was converted into a money-making device like snake oil was in 1898.

If this is the kind of inane conversation we are going to be subjected to at this late juncture in our history, we might as well all go bathe ourselves in snake oil.

I mean, what good is a college education if you don’t comprehend the point?

To reiterate my argument here in as simple a way as possible: Objectivity is a term from science. The idea is to come up with theoretical questions to test with hypothesis by gathering evidence and subjecting them to testing.

It is not the average daily newspaper reporter’s job to do this as the “business” is structured today. As the Ben Bradlee character said in the “All the King’s Men” movie, the film about Watergate, “It is not our job to print the truth. It is our job to print what people tell us.”

Therein lies the rub.

Readers want newspaper reporters to tell them the truth. But it takes a lot of brains, hard work and experience to be able to pull this off on deadline. So readers should rightly seek out people with the brains and experience who are willing to work at it to actually find out what the truth is and tell it like it is.

In fact, there are documents that if unearthed and written about could show that the original idea for objective journalism, at the New York Times no less, was about science, not capitalism. We are decades down the road from this and living our entire lives based on one big gigantic meme. It is a virus that plagues our culture and pollutes every conversation we have.

If we do not come up with a great big antidote for this, and soon, it could literally kill the world, or at least the human species. In my view this bad information is a bigger threat to our health than cancer or heart disease. If we form public policy on the basis of someone’s opinion that “there is no such thing as global warming,” for example, then we are freaking doomed.

The way I handle it is to deride the liars when they say something wrong and stupid, and the news organizations that report the lies, like I did the other day talking about the Republicans in Alabama. Of course the Birmingham and Huntsville papers cannot do this. They would have been out of business a long time ago if they even tried.

But if more news organizations would do that, perhaps politicians and others would not be so willing to tell lies in public. Liars like Mitt Romney know that whatever they say will make it onto television and be reported in newspapers too, because that is the nature of competitive capitalist news.

The unstated motto is: “Give people what they want, and let every moron decide for themselves what to believe.”

In this world, all opinions are equal — even if they are based on false community gossip, or a book written before there was a field of inquiry called science.

We used to say, “You have every right to your opinion, but not your own set of facts.”

I don’t know if they teach this at Harvard or not, but I learned in Philosophy 101 at the University of Alabama that there are “matters of opinion,” and there are “matters of fact.”

It seems to me that if President Obama never once in any speech actually apologized for America — and believe me if he did we would know it, because it would be all over Google – then for any news organization to report that without immediately pointing that out as a lie is not serving its audience well, only its advertisers. These days, that means corporations for the most part. And these days, the corporate CEOs lean Republican, so it serves their interests to have lies printed in newspapers like the New York Times. From there, they can be picked up by cable news commentators, bloggers and local politicians who repeat them to even win seats on the local school board.

Thus the vicious cycle of lies continues to destroy us.

As it happens, before I learned about this story last night, I happened to catch the movie Quiz Show on cable. If you want to become totally cynical about America and the media, watch that and see what happens in the end.

Kill the Meme

I have said this before and I will say it again, and again, and again, until enough people finally pick up on it and it becomes the antidote to the information virus. The only way to stop a meme is for someone who knows what they are talking about to post the truth online and let it travel around the Web until it kills the bad disease and destroys the career of the person willing to spread it.

I think it is pretty safe to say at this juncture that we pretty much destroyed the reputation of George W. Bush in this way, even though it was not in time to prevent his reelection in 2004.

As long as President Obama stays on course and keeps telling the truth, we will destroy his competition in 2012. We have that power now on the Web Press. We are about to eclipse Rush Limbaugh on radio and Fox News on TV. In fact, I think we have already.

Anybody want to bet me a 12-pack of Sweetwater Georgia Brown on that? I’m still looking for one or more takers for the presidential election of 2012.

These changes might not come about in Alabama just quite yet, but give it time. We will prevail in the end — unless they kill us first.

A federal appeals court has balked at deciding a controversial legal case pitting the Alabama Education Association and its ability to raise membership dues against the new Republican administration dead set on weakening public employee unions and suppressing votes for Democrats.

According to a court filing that just popped up online from the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, the federal appeals court panel tossed the state’s appeal in the case back to the all Republican Alabama Supreme Court. The professional organization for teachers won a victory in a lower court and obtained a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a law passed by the new so-called “Super Majority” of Republicans in the state Legislature, a law written to prohibit payroll deductions to groups that use some of the money for “political activity.”

The appeals court panel indicated it would be “constitutional” for the Legislature to block the payroll deduction if the organization is guilty of “electioneering.”

Outgoing AEA Executive Secretary Paul Hubbert told the Associated Press that AEA has a publication it uses to “inform” teachers about issues of concern to them, issues that are the subject of government action. But he denied that the organization is primarily engaged in “electioneering” for one party or another.

“We keep our members informed on the issues,” Hubbert is quoted as saying.

In reacting to the non-decision, the Birmingham News editorial board came out with another in a long line of unsigned, silly Newhouse-style editorials concluding that if AEA’s activities are “not electioneering .. we’ll admit we have no idea what electioneering is.”

Hey, they said it. We didn’t.

Apparently the near-monopoly press in Alabama is quite happy to have an all Republican court decide the issue, a court of elected judges who raise millions upon millions of dollars from corporate interests in some of the most high priced elections in the country.

It’s too bad the appeals court panel did not show a little more backbone and actually decide the issue. We know from previous experience how the Alabama Supreme Court will rule: On behalf of its corporate masters at the Business Council of Alabama.

Watch for more union busting and Democratic voter suppression measures when the Alabama Legislature gets back together in Montgomery come February. And don’t count on the courts in Alabama for justice — unless you are a highly paid executive at an insurance company or other major corporation that pays no taxes in the state.

Earlier Monday nearly 20 protesters were arrested in the atrium of the World Financial Centre following a protest against Goldman Sachs. This video shows a credentialed photographer attempting to photograph the arrests of protesters, being pushed back with a baton by one NYPD officer. Another officer continues to block his line of sight.

Free-lance photographer Robert Stolarik, who was working for the New York Times, was one of the few media able to remain in Zuccotti Park during the November 14 raid. His photos of Monday’s action appear with the article.

by Glynn Wilson

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Someone once said that practicing journalism is like capturing “history on the run.”

Sometimes when you are a fly on the wall at important events you think you are witnessing a historical moment. But it is sometimes hard to tell for sure. Like they say, only time will tell.

Did any of the reporters covering George Wallace’s inaugural address in 1963 have any idea what a seminal moment that would be in American political history?

Could anyone have anticipated that the groundswell of rage embodied in Wallace’s fiery rhetoric would lead to such a transformative movement for full-scale civil rights in the United States? Or that Wallace’s message and style would result in such a rising tide of so-called “conservatism” in American politics, a tide that has not yet fully dissipated over the country — or Wallace’s homeland of Alabama?

In conversations I had with my good friend Spider Martin before he died, it was apparent that those covering the events of the 1960s did have a sense that they were witnessing big historical moments. Spider was a photographer who covered a lot of the seminal clashes in civil rights history back then. He was there on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. You can see some of his photographs on the National Park Service Civil Rights Trail. And you can see him running in and out of the television news footage often used in documentaries of the time.

He later became the official photographer for George Wallace, however, and witnessed the man’s runs for governor and president up close and personal. From 2001-2003, I taped interviews with Spider about those days. One of these days I will get around to writing some stories up about what he said. He died in April, 2003, before we could finish the book we were working on together.

In 1965, I was only 8-years -old, living in a white flight suburb east of Birmingham. We were isolated from that history, except for what we saw on the evening news at dinner time. The local newspapers didn’t cover the protests or run pictures of Bull Connor’s dogs or fire hoses.

Many people in Alabama and across the South and the country are still isolated from it, which is one of the reasons the so-called “New Conservatism” started by the likes of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater and perfected by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush still survives to this day.

People who live in isolated rural or suburban communities with no opportunities for exposure to the diversity of the wider world and higher education tend to live in and cling to the past.

Even the Alabama Democratic Party, the party of Wallace, was still clinging to this past in many ways until the most recent election cycle, when the Republican Party finally completed its mission of becoming the party of bigotry and hate, the party that hates the government so bad it wants to run it completely into the ground so that it doesn’t work anymore at all.

The heirs to Wallace’s legacy in Alabama now have names like Scott Beason, Mike Hubbard and Shadrack McGill.

But there is a problem with the way these politicians are attempting to further their own political ambitions by following in Wallace’s footsteps.

If you go all the way back to 1963 and actually read the text of Wallace’s inaugural address, you will see that he was at least for education, not out to destroy it.

True, he was for educating white kids, not the black ones, but he considered it part of his mission and one of the reasons he got elected to stand for education of Alabama’s poor people. He was a Populist, after all, not part of the moneyed elite.

“… the farmer in the field, the worker in the factory, the businessman in his office, the housewife in her home, have decided that the money can be better spent to help our children’s education and our older citizens,” Wallace said, “and they have put a man in office to see that it is done.”

He went on to develop the community college system in the state, and I am here to tell you that chances are, I would not be here writing these words today if it had not been for that decision. My college education started in a community college. It was the teachers there who inspired me to study English, History, Political Science, Sociology and Journalism and go on to the University of Alabama for a Bachelor’s degree and later a Master’s, then to pursue a Ph.D. in Tennessee and teach there and in New Orleans.

The Republicans in charge today seem hell-bent on destroying educational opportunities except for the rich kids of white folks who can afford to pay for it. Wallace at least stood up for poor white people. The Republicans running for president, governor, the Legislature and the state Supreme Court these days seem to stand only for the 1%, a term popularized by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have a point.

Now let me get to mine.

I believe I witnessed some interesting history the other night in Montgomery, history you won’t see covered anywhere else. You see, I was the only reporter in the room last Friday night when the Alabama Democratic Party held its annual Hall of Fame dinner in Montgomery. It was not the only time in my career to be the only reporter in the room. At the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans once, I was the only reporter in the room with Rudi Giuliani. That got covered by UPI because I was there.

The event in Montgomery this weekend did not rate one single mention in any newspaper in the state, or on a single local television news broadcast, which I find quite odd.

True, a lot of what I witnessed was the passing of the old guard of the Democratic Party, which ruled my home state for 136 years. But I also saw something new.

While the party honored Paul Hubbert and Joe Reed of the Alabama Education Association as they pass from leadership positions in the party, the new head of the party, Mark Kennedy, did a couple of extraordinary things right in front of my eyes. For one, he declared that “there are no more back rooms” in the Alabama Democratic Party, and he encouraged young people to take up a leadership role. He refused to read the list of long-time dignitaries in his pocket, and he vowed not to have any speaker over 40 at next year’s event.

Kennedy is the son-in-law of George Wallace, having married Wallace’s baby girl Peggy in the early 1970s. He was also the only Alabama Supreme Court justice who ever beat Karl Rove’s political campaign company in a judicial election in the state, in 1994, even though he retired in 1998 rather than face the negative whisper campaign again.

Kennedy decided to re-write a little history for the Montgomery event. He re-cast Wallace’s speech from 1963 and gave it a new ending.

In case you are unfamiliar with the language from Wallace’s speech, you can watch the video below and read the text here. Here’s the key paragraph.

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

In his address to the Alabama Democratic Party Hall of Fame dinner crowd, Kennedy changed the wording, ending it this way (see video here or here):

“Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say justice today … justice tomorrow … and justice forever.”

Now as you know, I don’t have much faith in parties or much of anything else. Just a sliver of hope that this could hold true.

Justice?

In this state?

Imagine that…