This just in from Scott Horton.

Former Birmingham News ace reporter Brett Blackledge was recently hired by Ron Fournier, head of the AP’s Washington Bureau.

The AP’s Washington coverage has demonstrated a clear-cut GOP slant ever since Fournier took over, and the Blackledge hire is no doubt designed to help lock that in. Fournier’s key “inside source” and adviser is none other than Karl Rove.

This is now being reported by the independent Talking Points Memo:

Universal Theory of Bamboozlement

Earlier today we noted the possible role of AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier is turning the AP’s campaign coverage into “complete crap.”

Now from the just released Tillman Report, it seems Fournier was also one of the reporters exchanging emails the day of Tillman’s death with Karl Rove of all people - and according to the report at least, offering advice on how to handle the story.

“Keep up the fight,” Fournier tells Rove.

What fight? Objective journalism?

Looks like Rove’s Alabama Republican news buddy has hit the big time : )

Connecting the dots from government spying to private profit to keeping you in the dark…

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Did you wake up Friday morning and turn on your computer and notice that your connection to the Internet was running a lot slower than usual?

Well, you were not alone.

Have you seen one single solitary news organization in your community or in this nation that provided a report on what was going on?

No you say?

Welcome to the future of news.

We reached a critical turning point this week in who controls the information you will be able to get for the rest of your lives. And guess what, you are the loser.

And your Senators in Washington are as responsible as the president and the telephone and cable companies that want to control all the information and avoid lawsuits to boot.

Senate Passes Bush’s Spy Bill With Telecom Immunity

But does that news bother the editorial writers at the state and nation’s big newspapers? Apparently not.

As long as ATandT keeps those Web ads coming to the Websites of the corporate chain newspapers, they will just continue to lay off more reporters and crank out the local PR - and laugh all the way to the bank.

To get a glimpse of where this is headed, here’s a sampling of headlines Sunday from some of the biggest Internet Service Providers in the U.S.

At Charter.net, my ISP, the headlines were:

Photos prompt Ms. America scandal

Inside The Secret Britney Video Shoot

At Att.net, the site of the phone giant ATandT, broken up by the Reagan Justice Department but put back together by the Bush administration under the control of Southwest Bell out of Texas (Bush country), here’s what’s news:

Create the perfect burger

6 dating moves that show you’re interested

At Verizon.net, videos are popular, such as this one:

Step Brothers - video

At Cox.com, they like to report on themselves a lot:

Cox Ranked Highest Among Business Data Providers in J.D. Power and Associates Study

At Comcast.net, the lead programmer must be a Stones fan:

Rolling Stone Leaves Wife for Teenager

An exhaustive search, even among the government sponsored techie magazines online, found very little to explain what happened this week or even hint at the Rubicon we crossed.

At least I found this headline, but if you think guys in business suits with some technical training are the journalists of the future, let’s hope this guy from the Washington Technology blog is not the model for it.

If you haven’t already, it’s time to climb aboard the Web 2.0 trend

Of course like every other Bush appointee to high office over the past seven and a half years, the FCC’s Michael Martin talks a good game about standing up for freedom - while doing everything behind the scenes to destroy it. Look at the Bush FCC’s statement on Net Neutratily:

“The Commission, under Title I of the Communications Act, has the ability to adopt and enforce the net neutrality principles it announced in the Internet Policy Statement. The Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Commission ‘has jurisdiction to impose additional regulatory obligations under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction to regulate interstate and foreign communications.’ Indeed, the Supreme Court specifically recognized the Commission’s ancillary jurisdiction to impose regulatory obligations on broadband Internet access providers.” (From Broadband Deployment Notice of Inquiry - April 16, 2007)

The availability of the Internet has had a profound impact on American life. This network of networks has fundamentally changed the way we communicate. It has increased the speed of communication, the range of communicating devices and the variety of platforms over which we can send and receive information.

As Congress has noted, “the rapidly developing array of Internet . . . services available to individual Americans represent an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources to our citizens.”

The Internet also represents “a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.”

In addition, the Internet plays an important role in the economy, as an engine for productivity growth and cost savings.

But it is up to us to provide the “but….”

The but is that all of that is well and good, let everyone in the country publish their own blog, but don’t expect the programmers and business suits who want to make all the money off the Web really allow people to access all of those blogs. When the traffic level picks up, they now have the power to muzzle traffic to a Web site like this one - and not have to worry about being sued in court for doing it.

How is that possible, you say? And what does that have to do with the spying bill, telecom vote in the Senate this week?

Well, you see, the telecom giants have to be able to spy on your Web use to figure out how to grab all the traffic and advertising revenue. That’s the bottom line.

Newspapers are already losing print circulation to people who have learned how to connect to the Internet and switched to reading on the Web on their computer screens. Newspaper managers hate blogs and especially craigslist.org, the free classified ad service with the simple text interface. It’s so easy to use and effective that most people who are Web savvy have switched to using it to buy and sell things and find a place to live.

So newspapers are having a hard time selling classified ads anymore, a staple of their revenue stream for the past 100 years. What will replace that revenue? How will they survive?

Will the telecom ad money save them? Or is that just a short term mechanism of survival for them, while the telecoms figure out everyone’s habits so they can corner the market?

Like everything else in a democracy, it is ultimately going to be up to the people to elect candidates who will stand up for them. There has never been a more critical election than the one coming up in November. Have the two major parties selected the right candidates?

I have my doubts. But it’s not like there is a viable third party alternative.

Perhaps the only hope we have is for people in the know to keep up the pressure on the candidate of “hope,” Barack Obama. He broke one campaign promise already and voted for the FISA bill this week. This is a troubling sign.

There were a few Senators who had the courage and the intelligence to stand against the bill. We published the best of their speeches here. If you want to know what’s really going on, you should go there and read them. We may be the only news organization in American to publish them.

We know the big newspapers largely ignored them.

And it is a sure bet that you would not see a word about them on the big bad home pages of the future. Do you think for a second that ATandT or the cable companies would publish a story that says they should be sued, a story that directly attacks their ability to continue building an economic and information monopoly in the future?

Of course not. The phone companies and cable companies have no stake in the First Amendment. They own it. The freedom belongs to newspapers, they believe, but they simply will not stand up and fight for that right online.

So now that the debate is over and all the latest spying software was loaded onto every computer server on Friday, the day after the FISA bill was signed exempting them from legal liability, the next fight is on the way.

There are thousands of programmers working for corporations right now trying to figure out how to shut us up and shut us down. There are a few programmers who take sides with us in the debate over Net Neutrality. But there are fewer and fewer jobs for them outside of corporate America.

The bottom line is this. We have this freedom to publish now, but it may not be around much longer.

Where do you stand? Do you want to depend on ATandT for your news?

If not, maybe it’s time you considered taking a pro-active step to support the independent Web Press.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Now that we convinced some key United States Senators to delay the vote on Bush’s spying bill and legal immunity for the telecom giants until after the Fourth of July, Independence Day holiday - keeping the Constitution out of the fire for at least a few more days - it’s normally that time of year when we all take a summer break.

In normal times of peace and prosperity, we could all break out the barbecue grills or head for the boat on the lake and pop off some firecrackers and revel in the inherent beauty of American freedom.

Alas, this is no normal year and these are not normal times.

If I were one to put any mental stock into Biblical prophecy, I would say there is plenty of evidence to say these are “the end times.” Floods, forest fires, droughts, food crises, wars and rumors of wars (will Bush-Cheney bomb-bomb Iran before they leave office?)

This has become something of a joke amongst the so-called Birmingham Gay Photographers Club, so named by me for a group of mostly bachelors who get together and go camping from time to time and specialize in photographing nature. Since most are over 50 and are not married, they also like to make gay jokes about each other. It’s a guy thing. (Sorry ladies, and gay people : )

Because of the serious nature of the times, I promise not to write about what I had for breakfast today or the latest on my Revolutionary Garden.

Instead I feel like a little government and media criticism.

While you all know how I feel about the monopoly, corporate press in Alabama, meaning the Newhouse newspapers in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile, I do check in from time to time just to see if they are getting the message over there in corporate-chain medialand.

And ever so subtly, it looks like the pendulum is beginning to swing - if just a tad.

Anyone who knows anything about the culture of newsrooms knows it takes a long time to change anything. We’ve hammered their lousy Web design for so long that I just get burned out on bothering.

The Birmingham News has now turned its Website mostly into a series of blogs - as if readers turn to newspapers for blogs - although the programmers at Advance still don’t understand that what readers need is a news page that quickly tells them what the important news of the day is going to be. Not just yesterday’s news posted at 4 a.m. The news that is happening NOW in Washington, New York, London, or Bagdad - or Clay, Alabama.

“It’s going to be a sunny day today,” is not the lead story, guys and gals. Sorry to break it to you.

And while we still refuse to link to it, if you are so inclined to keep up with what newspapers in Alabama are covering today about what happened yesterday, you can do it easily enough on this page:

Alabama News

If you go there and hit the Birmingham News and then search around for the Editorial Page, which is incredibly hidden to the point where we wonder if they are just ashamed of it, you will find an editorial from Sunday FINALLY acknowledging that the Bush Justice Department’s Inspector General’s office released a report last week saying politics and ideology played a paramount role in everything the department has done during the tenure of President George W. Bush, including the hiring of interns.

The editorial page editor of the paper, Bob Blalock, who everyone says is a “nice guy,” a euphemism for “not so smart,” received an interesting honor recently from the University of Alabama’s College of Communications (my alma mater). In their new public relations brochure to keep alumni up on the goings on of the department, the redesigned Communicator - which you can download and read as a pdf file here - you can read the blurb about him receiving the alumni of the year award for print journalism.

You can also read a puff piece about First Lady Laura Bush’s reading program, which she apparently formed to help out her illiterate husband.

And of course Mr. Blalock was awarded this honor by the new dean, whose picture is all over this issue, who as it happens also served in the Texas Air National Guard at the same time as Bush. You remember the story about how Bush went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 to work on a political campaign in Alabama.

Some coincidence, eh? More of Karl Rove’s handiwork in Alabama?

Nah, that would just be a lefty conspiracy theory, right? Then why did they take that entry on his curriculum vitae off the Website after I asked his secretary about it and pointed it out to the former dean? We just report. You decide…

Meanwhile Blalock’s editorial page, while finally telling its readers about the politicized Bush Justice Department in the Sunday paper, has a simple conclusion to draw from it. It was just “dumb.”

The only thing we can conclude is that if the Bush Justice Department was just “dumb,” then the Birmingham News editorial staff must just be “dumber,” since the most important case in the country of this corrupt, political justice occurred right under their noses.

It is quite interesting and curious that one of the two star reporters here who carried the Bush Justice Department’s water in perpetuating this Republican brand of political justice recently left the paper, as we reported here, even though he told me he was happy here just a few months ago after winning a freaking Pulitzer Prize for his reporting supporting the Bush Justice Department’s view of the world.

And since it took several days for the News to discover, digest and pass on the story about the report, I guess it will take them even longer to get around to passing on the most important story this week out of Washington.

That is, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat, issued a subpoena to the Department of Justice this week demanding documents in the ongoing investigation of politics at the department, including the Siegelman case. You can download and read the document here on the committee’s Website.

The DOJ has until July 9 to produce those documents, including e-mails. That deadline falls on the eve of the day when the committee is expecting to hear from former Bush political adviser Karl Rove. This could be the most interesting news in the month of July, unless of course Senator John McCain gets the domestic terrorist attack he needs to win the presidential election.

Rove has been subpoenaed to appear and testify under oath - or face arrest for contempt of Congress. Of course he has so far refused to honor the demand to appear, citing White House executive privilege, even though it is not clear how conversations with the president were involved - unless Bush was fully in the loop in the investigation of Siegelman.

Now if that were the case, it would add another interesting tidbit to the considerable list of reasons why Bush-Cheney should be impeached, even though it is obvious this Democratic Party-controlled Congress has no stomach for impeachment in this historic election year.

Now here’s an interesting morsal to savor as you chow down on Fourth of July barbecue and burn the flag for true Independence from tyranny. The ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar S. Smith, a Texas Republican, of course, has said that if Conyers subpoenas and arrests Karl Rove, he will try to subpoena and arrest Alabama’s famous GOP whistleblower Jill Simpson to testify at the same time.

Well, we have it on good authority that if he tries to do that there might be a problem. There is a certain sea-going cruise planned in the land of the Czars in the days ahead. Where will Karl Rove be on July 10?

Stay tuned in blogland. You may never find out in mainstream medialand, unless it’s just plain too late…

Will the real Democrats please stand up … and filibuster?

Ad 2: The Senate just adjourned for the night and will take up the FISA legislation Thursday morning. Obviously, there are some important people who have some thinking to do.

But not before taking a test vote:

Senate Nears End of Surveillance Bill Debate

One of the most important votes in the history of the United States Congress will take place perhaps tonight. Since you will not see coverage of this on CNN, you better watch the blogs and C-SPAN 2.

As we reported last Friday, the cowardly Democrats who control the House of Representatives voted with the Republicans in favor the new domestic surveillance bill, granting a back door form of legal immunity for the telecom giants. They made it where a judge can grant the companies immunity - based solely on a piece of paper showing President George W. Bush authorized the illegal spying on Americans in the wake of 9/11 himself.

Scott Horton writes today at Harpers.org: Will the National Surveillance State Prevail Again?

His buddy Glen Greenwald at Salon.com, owned by the Washington Post, carried this detailed account: FISA A Significant Victory for the Democratic Party? Not…

One blog commenter says:

Victory is still possible in the fight against warrantless spying and immunity for the telecom companies that collaborated in previous illegal spying. There are signs of significant divisions in the Senate that we may yet be able to exploit to defeat the Senate version of HR 6304.

The divisions are deep enough that there still isn’t a Senate version of the House bill, or a bill number, and there are still multiple ways we could win this fight.

One strategy is to find a Senator willing to filibuster, and thereby block a vote. The aggressive progressives found one:

Senator Feingold Will Filibuster FISA

Then, the Washington Independent has now verified that House members may have been swayed by donations from the telephone companies such as ATandT and Verizon. Surprise! Surprise!

Telecom Donations Tied to FISA Vote

According to the Daily Kos, the Senate may vote tonight or there may be a filibuster.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., took to the Senate floor this afternoon to talk about the FISA bill and to detail, point by point, the failure of the Hoyer/Rockefeller capitulation. Here’s the statement he and Sen. Dodd released yesterday announcing their intent to filibuster:

“This is a deeply flawed bill, which does nothing more than offer retroactive immunity by another name. We strongly urge our colleagues to reject this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation and oppose any efforts to consider this bill in its current form. We will oppose efforts to end debate on this bill as long as it provides retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that may have participated in the President’s warrantless wiretapping program, and as long as it fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

“If the Senate does proceed to this legislation, our immediate response will be to offer an amendment that strips the retroactive immunity provision out of the bill. We hope our colleagues will join us in supporting Americans’ civil liberties by opposing retroactive immunity and rejecting this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation.”

Another good place for good blog journalism on this issue is the TPM Mukraker.

In a related story, the Washington Post this morning carried a story about the ISP Charter Communications’ plan to spy on customers and sell the information to advertisers.

Charter Halts Plan to Track Surfing Data

Are newspaper editors just not paying attention to this battle? They are either AWOL or just on the wrong side of this fight. The telephone and cable companies are as much of a threat to newspapers as bloggers and craigslist.org. Why won’t they fight back?

But the big question for the day is:

Will Senator Barack Obama, who promised we are “not a country where wiretapping is done without warrants,” before we made him the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, stand up and join the filibuster? Will Senator Hillary Clinton stand with us?

If not, we may just have to crash the convention in Colorado in August and put someone else in there. Hey Al Gore? Hey John Edwards? Want to be president?

Birmingham News staff writer Brett Blackledge, who won a Pulitzer Prize for investigating mostly Black Democrats who work in Alabama’s two-year college system and also happen to be into public service by serving in the state legislature, is taking my advice and leaving the paper to take a job in Washington, D.C. with the Associated Press.

While I broke the story on an e-mail list on Friday that his days were numbered, here is the first mention of the departure in the paper, in Executive Editor Tom Scarrett’s little column that normally deserves scant notice since it usually says nothing about nothing.

We face a special challenge at The Birmingham News because we are losing a special reporter. Brett Blackledge, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, is leaving our staff to become an enterprise reporter in The Associated Press’ Washington bureau, doing investigative work on national security and intelligence issues. It’s a great opportunity for him, but a great loss for us in Alabama.

Watchdog Reporting Biggest Job?

And like I’ve said on the blog and the radio before, the Birmingham News’s idea of watchdog journalism is sort of the like the Bush Justice Department’s idea of justice: All the time and money goes into investigating mostly poor Black Democrats, while the big time corruption of rich White Republicans is completely ignored.

When Blackledge did his first hit job on Jill Simpson, I told him he should use the clout of that Pulitzer to get the heck out of here and go to work for a real news organization somewhere else.

Good luck Brett. And good riddance. Alabama’s political system has been screwed up bad enough by bad reporting from the “Bug Mule” papers before. Now perhaps we can begin the real job of media reform in this state.

For those of you interested in following the news on media reform, there are a number of stories today on the Poynter Institute’s site that talk about the problems of the traditional newspaper industry, including an analysis from the New York Times saying this year could be the worst ever for newspapers, and another from Ad Age saying “the sky is falling! It’s totally falling, for real!”