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 : )

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.

by Glynn Wilson

One of the best reporters and writers from Alabama soil was on the receiving end of a pink slip this week in the continuing meltdown of the mainstream print news business.

Brooks Boliek, 49, originally of Vestavia, Alabama, was let go from the Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, as indicated in this tabloid media blog post from Nikki Finke:

Tuesday Massacre At THE Hollywood Reporter

Boliek had become something of an institution in Washington circles for covering Congress and the Federal Communications Commission and stories related to the politics of the entertainment industry, especially the movie business.

Boliek, who received a journalism degree from UAB in the mid-1980s, started his professional journalism career in Leeds, Alabama – home of Charles Barkley – at the Leeds News.

I met Boliek in the newsroom of the Decatur Daily in 1985, where we started out as competitors but soon became fast friends who collaborated on a few stories before I sued the paper and he left for the Florence Times-Daily. As I moved to the Southside of Birmingham and launched a free-lance career from the NewsBreak bookstore and coffee shop, he migrated to the Montgomery Advertiser for a time.

After the Democratic Party’s convention in Atlanta in 1988, he moved to Washington and got a start there at the now defunct State’s News Service, eventually moving to Congress Daily and then the Hollywood Reporter, where he worked for a long 16-year run.

He’s not sure what the next move will bring, but the applications are out and he’s working on a Website inspired by his favorite professional hobby, fine wood working.

“It’s been a hell of a run, but now it’s time to move on,” Boliek said. “The outpouring of support from all the people I’ve worked with in this town has been overwhelming, and gratifying.”

The link to his popular Think Tank column still works for now on the Locust Fork News page under his name and Columnists, if you care to read any of his work.

He joins a growing list of reporters who have recently been let go, including 150 staffers at the Los Angeles Times. He gets a bit emotional and upset at some of the criticism reporters face from the blogosphere.

“I fought for the First Amendment every day of my life,” he said. “The First Amendment is first, by God.”

He is one of those reporters who can figure out what is going on, explain it well, “and do it really fast,” he said. “You read all this junk about how rotten we are. But most of the reporters I know, even when they are not making jack shit, work really hard to tell the truth. How long can the body politic stand this?”

He phrases the question like this.

“The CIA director is forced out after a year and the White House gives no reason at all for it. What will the new press secretary do when asked for an explanation that was glaringly absent on Friday? Monday is Tony Snow’s first day on the job. Let’s see if reason-giving can make a comeback.”

My comments on the issue:

It would be too much to ask to expect anything to get better in this lame duck administration. They have no choice but to continue stonewalling and hope to make it another two and a half years without being impeached, removed from office, put in jail or killed by “terrorists.”

The legacy press has no choice but to continue doing what they are doing, kissing up to power to keep that 20 percent profit rolling in.

Nothing will change until the Democrats take back Congress and newspaper circulation drops to a point where publishers take the drastic step of actually hiring the best reporters, paying them real money, and realizing that their future depends on regaining the trust of readers.

Newspaper blogging will not save them because they are no good at it and people trun to blogs for something alternative to the same old cheap syndicated BS.

Nuff said…

January 31, 2006

Mr. Burl Osborne, Chairman
The Associated Press
450 W. 33rd Street
New York, New York 10001
 
Exerpts:

Inexperienced managers of a “new AP” must understand that however they rearrange the furniture, the wire’s integrity depends on the reporters who actually gather the news upon which billions of people shape their reality.
***
AP stands for reliable news, however difficult it may be to gather and whomever it may irritate. After air, water and food, it is the most basic of human needs. 
***
Sources who risk dismissal or death for telling the truth depend on anonymity.
***
…go find news, not merely react to it in case it wandered across our desk. 
***
Your children eat from my camera. To me, you are para-zeet.
***
For 21 years, AP paid for a baseball bat, and I hit hard with it. Your new executive editor whittled that down to a toothpick.
***
…editors seemed to favor foreign coverage shaped in Washington and New York.
***
No school can shape a seasoned correspondent. Young people must work with veterans. Background, vital to any story that matters, depends on long memories.  Any eager neophyte can hop into a hairy situation. Then what? Danger is one thing. Experience saves more lives than flak vests or Centurion courses.  But even in placid situations, it takes practice to find the program, let alone the players. Fresh reporters who prove themselves quickly must feel they have a solid future when they cost more and talk back.
***
Much was made over how AP ignored the London Sunday Times’ Downing Street scoop, a smoking gun that revealed how evidence was faked to start a war. AP London did not relay the story, credited to the Times, the simplest of routine tasks. Then editorial inaction in New York let it slip away. In a different AP, a diplomatic reporter like Art Gavshon, or a Mike Goldsmith, or a Steve Miller, would have broken the story first.
***
They’ve taken an organic thing and tried to make it into a machine.  It doesn’t work.
***
AP should set the agenda and define news rather than follow trends.  Play may suffer if you’re ahead of the pack, but the long run counts. Obsessing over Hermes not opening up late for Oprah Winfrey in Paris was not your finest hour. By one recent poll, American readers clicked most on a newspaper’s story about some guy’s sex act with his horse. The world needs your leadership.
***
While some reporters are gentle, lovable souls, many others are cutting tools, with hard edges. This is what enables them to break down doors and get at reality. Allow them to talk back, to argue, to insist on reporting what they see.
***
Do not dumb down the report. People who care about news want real background. Just before the Iraq war, the top editor roasted me for mentioning Nasser, saying no one knew who he was. That was the point. You can’t explain this conflict without tracing how, or why, Muslims and Arabs grew radicalized.
***
Don’t bury news with false balance. That was why Serbs got away with mass murder for so long ago. For examples, look at Israel v. Palestine. (Can you say Hamas?)
***
Don’t let unnamed sources keep real news off the wire. Arab reporters obtain crucial interviews with Iraqi insurgents who can’t be identified. The copy seldom reaches the wire, which carries a flood of stuff about brave U.S. troops. (This is what the Bush administration wants, but not readers, even conservative ones).

Read the full letter here:

Media: “If his breed is not to die …”

Here, here! Editors at The New York Times and every newspaper in the country should also read this and heed the sound advice. Otherwise, they will soon go the way of the jungle drum as a form of communication. That’s OK around here. We’ll take your online traffic and save the trees too.