Five Years Ago Today, this Web Press was Born to Counter the Fourth Estate

Brooks Boliek

The Boliek house in Takoma Park, Maryland, where this site was started five years ago today…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

THE BUNKER – Five years ago today, I huddled in front of a little apple red iMac computer in a friend’s kitchen in Tacoma Park, Maryland, near Silver Spring. It was there I wrote the very first Sunday column for this alternative, independent news Web site, there in the pouring rain with the jazz down low on the radio.

By that time, George W. Bush had been sworn in for a second term, so we knew he would be with us for another three and a half years. There was not much hope for stopping all the damage he would surely cause in that time, but somebody had to try to warn the public.

There was always the hope of impeachment.

That story never did grow legs, or at least not long enough to ever be considered a real threat to the corporate state pulling Bush’s strings.

As the rain poured with the jazz in the background, I read about the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, and thought of my good friend Spider Martin, who had given up the ghost two years before, also by self-inflicted gunshot wound.

You’ve just about got to be a big picture kind of writer to make sense of moments like that — in an hour or two of reading, thinking and writing. That’s about how long it takes to produce an average newspaper-style column of about a thousand words.

The problem was, everywhere you looked over the Internets on the World Wide Web at that time, there were these things called “blogs” popping up all over the place like mushrooms in a cow pasture after a summer rain.

In the face of that kind of fast-paced change, what was an experienced, real journalist to do in these times, five years after the heralded advent of the new millennium?

There was all this anonymous defamation on some sites; on others, it was mostly self-congratulatory navel-gazing, like reality TV. Ugh!

Could the Free Press and American Democracy survive both Bush — and blogs?

Gawd only knew.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Moyers profiles Alabama native and world renowned scientist E.O. Wilson Friday, July 6, on the latest edition of “Bill Moyers Journal.” The show took a new spot on PBS in April under the same name as the old show canceled in 1981.

Moyers talks to Wilson about subjects ranging from his work cataloging every living creature on earth to religion to his vision for facing climate change.

Read the interview here.

Read the Locust Fork Journal review of his latest book Creation here:
A Response to E.O. Wilson: A Letter to the Church.

The Bush Administration lied us into an unending war – with the help of the media, according to a Bill Moyers special to air Wednesday, April 25, at 8 p.m. CDT on Public Television. Sources say he documents the lies of both the Bush Administration and the media to sell the Iraq war to the American public.

Learn more at Bill Moyers Journal Blog at PBS.Org.

If you are curious about the changes going on in American news gathering and delivery, from print newspapers to the Web, PBS Frontline is a good place to turn.

Drawing on more than 80 interviews with key figures in the print, broadcast and electronic media, and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today’s most important news organizations, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman examines the challenges facing the mainstream news media, and the media’s reaction, in “News War,” a special four-part series.

Series Synopsis

News War Intro

Public Broadcasting’s “Nature” aired a show tonight well worth catching on the re-run.

“Christmas In Yellowstone” was a breathtaking look at wintertime deep within America’s first national park, stretching across more than 2.2 million acres of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. Yellowstone National Park is one of the greatest expanses of unspoiled nature and wildlife anywhere on Earth.

One day I would like to visit there, when the budget allows.

It was designated America’s first national park in 1872, thanks to then-President Theodore Roosevelt, and now receives almost three million visitors each year, compared to the Great Smoky Mountains’ 10 million. Yet only a small fraction of those who glimpse the park’s stunning vistas, geological wonders, and animal residents do so during the winter months, according to the show’s Web site, at a time when nature’s inhospitality is matched only by its serenity.

“Nature” follows in the snowy footprints of Yellowstone’s red foxes, spies on the predatory warfare of wolves and elk, and climbs into the den of a grizzly bear that gives birth to two cubs while deep in hibernation. In addition to mesmerizing footage of landscapes and wildlife, trail alongside author and photographer Tom Murphy, who has been coming to Yellowstone for the past 26 winters, camping and photographing amid the silence and solitude of the park.

Go behind the scenes with filmmaker Shane Moore on the Web site to find out how he kept up with Murphy during an at times harrowing trek, reminiscent of the legendary John Colter’s first journey into the park nearly 200 years ago.

PBS’s Nature: Christmas In Yellowstone

Alabama Public Television’s “For The Record” news show is running a special series on the state’s connections to Cuba. Watch Thursday, September 7 for the segment on Cuba’s economy.

As a communist country, Cuba’s economy operates very differently from our own. There are issues involving converting currency, the currency used in the country and the money stores accept. The types of jobs and careers people pursue are determined in different ways with much government input. The Cuba government also controls the distribution of food within the country.

OK, I lied. Allow me to be just a tad snarky . . . at least for a minute or two.

After watching opening day in the Senate confirmation hearings on President Bush’s choice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court – an allegedly “poor” judge from New Jersey named Sam Alito – and after updating the headlines on the news page from today’s wires, I plopped down in the Stratolounger and began to channel surf.

What I saw on Alabama Public Television gave me such a queasy feeling that a trip to the Yuengling cooler was required. Surely this new reality show is a sick joke, I thought, someone’s idea of bringing some conservative, Christian balance to the so-called “liberal” media.

The PBS FRONTLINE series called “Country Boys” is the story of Chris and Cody, according to the show’s Web site, “two boys growing up in a hard land, determined to beat the odds against them, and struggling with who they are – and who they can become.”

Perhaps the promo should be re-written, however, to say the show is “for everyone who remembers what it was like to grow up poor, dumb, white and Christian in the American South.”

We doubt anyone else will watch, although the funny or scary thing is, I could not bring myself to change the channel. David Sutherland’s film about these poor teenagers in “Appalachia” was riveting for reasons I cannot explain.

Has anyone else had the same experience with it? Or is it just someone’s idea of bringing Christian conservative balance to the so-called “liberal” media?