internet

A Kosnik called Alegre has loudly discontinued his participation on DailyKos:

Sadly, the majority of the administrators have allowed this hostile environment to develop in our online community for anyone who isn’t planted firmly in the Obama camp. They’ve routinely ignored personal attacks and allowed disruptive, spam-like posts to go unchecked whenever anyone expresses support for Hillary or challenges something their candidate has said or done....

...As a result, our community has become little more than an echo chamber with an attitude that harkens back to the early days of Dubbya’s administration - yer either with us or yer a’gin us, heh! The attackers and disrupters are no better than Chris Matthews with their sexism, hate, lies, and obsession with bashing - all - things - Hillary....

...[I]s that the kind of behavior that Obama would be proud of? Do the venomous attacks and lies about fellow Democrats represent him and all he stands for in an accurate and fair manner? Does this spiteful and vindictive behavior reunite our party? Would outing this working mother represent hope? Would it bring about change? Would Obama encourage that sort of anger, bullying, intimidation and hate from his followers toward another Democrat and her supporters? Do those followers of his help his cause at the end of the day?

I can't say I'm surprised. For me, I decided to stop enduring the abuse from "allies" when the pie fight happened.

Play of the Day: Romney's No Democrat

Well, duh! The guy is trying to be the scariest man since Himmler.

Edwards labels Clinton an Insider

Oooooh! I never saw that coming! Gotta admit, though: the MSM love a good fight (and will do what they can to spur it on).

Giuliani talks about his prostate cancer

And the issue is not whether he's healthy enough to take on this demanding office. No. It's the hook for his own health insurance plan. Thanks, AP. That's a great headline. Very informative.

Clinton, Giuliani top scary costume poll

Once again, Hillary Rodham Clinton leads in a poll. This time, she's the top choice when people are asked which major 2008 presidential candidate would make the scariest Halloween costume.

What does this mean? Is AP trying out for the writing staff of Saturday Night Live?

This one I just love:

Clinton dominates campaign news

This one we have to hand to Reuters. Nothing like the news media reporting their own behavior as news. I guess that's one way to try to boost circulation.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has dominated news coverage of the 2008 White House race, partly due to negative segments about her on conservative talk radio, according to a new study released on Monday.

At some point, someone new is going to be hired in journalism schools that is going to shake the orthodoxy up a bit. "Today a somebody said something about someone, according to something we heard somewhere, at some point." Now that's a way to hook a reader!

Giuliani blasts Clinton

Do you detect a theme here? I have yet to come across any other presidential candidate in my feed reader today. --Whoops! I'm back to yesterday!

Oh, wait. I did miss this:

Obama singer wins cheers despite protest

A Grammy-winning singer whose role in a Barack Obama campaign event riled gay activists served as master of ceremonies of a gospel concert promoting the Democratic presidential hopeful Sunday night.

I guess that is news. I'm not sure it's good news, though.

Oh, wait. I see the pattern now. Late night Sunday night is the time to post articles about Richardson, Dodd, McCain, Huckabee, Thompson, Putin -- oops.

Interesting how there are so many invisible candidates.

Ah, but at least the mainstream media are onto their own game.

When it comes to presidential politics, the news media loves front-runners. And seems to hate them, too.

Don't you feel reassured? Doesn't that just make you want to read more mainstream media manufacture?

Oh, and by the way, Ron Paul supporters, nada regarding your man in the past several days, though the "liberal" New York Times found you.

Smugness in mainstream obscurity, apparently. Morons indeed. Ha!

What's absent through all the coverage? Substance. What do the candidates actually say about healthcare? The deficit? National security? Social Security? Global warming? Energy policy? Education?

Not a whole lot. That crap is boring! Or so say the "news" editors of these mainstream outlets.

And of course we'll get a story about how we don't know much about the positions of any of the candidates.

That is what we call "news."

Good night, and good luck!

Via TechCrunch, we see that:

Al Jazeera signed a commercial agreement with Google last week to share advertising revenue on their YouTube channel....

Since many of the wingutteria consider Al Jazeera the voice of the enemy, one just might have to laugh at the irony. After all, You Tube is very much an American phenomenon that has captured the world's imagination and interest. And yet the Republican candidates for president were afraid to go to You Tube.

Afraid, or simply just too clueless.

Now we can anticipate seeing wise thought leaders like Bill O'Reilly call You Tube an Al Jazeera front, or use rhetoric of that ilk. Nothing like the tail wagging the dog. The way Republicans keep cowering from the realities of this world, is it any wonder they're excusing themselves from any realistic consideration for leading this world?

After all, shouldn't a decent red-blooded conservative be allowed to use violence to prove just how not-gay he is?

Carlson said, "Having sex in a public men's room is outrageous. It's also really common. I've been bothered in men's rooms." Carlson continued, "I've been bothered in Georgetown Park," in Washington, D.C., "when I was in high school." When Abrams asked how Carlson responded to being "bothered," as Abrams and Scarborough laughed, Carlson asserted, "I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and ... hit him against the stall with his head, actually." The laughter continued.

Carlson's comments, coupled with laughter from Abrams and Scarborough, suggested to viewers that physical violence is an appropriate response to an unwelcome overture. This is dangerous and wrong.

MSNBC has yet to acknowledge Carlson's comments or address why Abrams and Scarborough laughed while Carlson recounted his actions. Instead, MSNBC has treated Carlson's comments as a laughing matter, re-airing the portion in which Carlson claimed to have been "bothered," but omitting the portion in which he seemed to boast of physical assault.

Typical liberal media bias -- er, liberal blog bias, trying to oppress decent homophobes! Don't the violently-not-gay people in this world have the right to express themselves, too?

After all, it must be so hard for all these conservatives who had to choose not to be gay in the first place.

Republican candidates don't get the internet at all, it seems:

Conservative bloggers associated with the “Save the Debate” petition seem to be unconvinced that Republican candidates have really grasped the significance of the YouTube debate. George Ajjan, writing in New Jersey’s Herald News, takes Republicans to task for their failure to understand basic aspects of the political internet:

The comments of those skeptical about the YouTube debates sadly exemplify many of the traditional and stereotypical shortcomings of Republicans. The GOP has got to shatter the image of country-club elitism that plagues the party. Giuliani’s campaign prioritizing fundraising over a one-day commitment to appear before millions of viewers and answer tough questions directly from the electorate is deplorable and plays right into that regrettable typecast….

As far as YouTube itself goes, the issue is not that national Republicans don’t want to use new technologies. Both Giuliani and Romney have invested heavily in their online efforts and have specifically touted their embrace of YouTube as a campaigning medium. But their behavior seems to indicate the belief that the internet is a switch they can turn on and off, depending upon whether they’re in the mood to communicate. But the internet is always “on,” although it’s not always “on your terms.”

Until our party truly grasps that, we will continue to alienate voters and activists, especially young people for whom the internet is not “new,” but an integral part of their political upbringing.

The Republicans don’t have a technology problem, per se. They have an arrogance problem, and it’s spilling over into their online outreach efforts. Coming at a time when polls show young voters abandoning the GOP en masse, this bodes ill for the elephants.

The Right Field.

This is more than just arrogance, though. The internet is a medium that lends itself to free speech, egalitarian values (at least as far as right to ones own opinion goes), empowering the people.

The internet might have made sense in the old Republican party of Barry Goldwater, but it is really nothing but a threat to (or at best only a tool to be exploited by) modern day neo-Republicans who have ditched libertarian values in favor of big government as big brother.

In other words, it is not modern Republican arrogance that puts them at odds with the internet, but rather modern Republican culture that is diametrically opposed to a medium that gives us peasants a way of talking back at them ... and talking amongst ourselves.

Can the neo-Republicans and their vision of authoritarian government keeping the people in line succeed in the internet age? I doubt it. The party is already fraying and showing serious signs of breaking. They are going to have to reinvent themselves or destroy the internet to preserve their privilege.

This announcement is pretty astounding.

Today the Associated Press (AP) and NowPublic
announced that they have agreed to a deal that will bring NowPublic's
citizen content into AP's news gathering network. According to the
press release, the two companies will work together to explore ways of
involving NowPublic's on-the-ground network of news contributors with
AP's breaking news coverage – increasing the worlds access to news as
it happens.

To put this into perspective, on any given day, more than half the
world's population sees news from AP – so this is an unparalleled
distribution opportunity for citizen created content and contributors to NowPublic.

NowPublic has been a leader in the citizen journalism revolution. For a cornerstone of the mainstream media to open its gates to citizen journalists is revolutionary for them (if rather late from the perspective of those of us on the outside of those gates). Good on the AP!

Now that DC has awakened to the reality of a more engaged online populace, not only are we seeing online announcements of candidacy (or candidacy exploration, heh), but also the beginnings of what is pretty much inevitable:

Negative campaigning in blog threads.

Yes, not only will we have wingnut fundamentalist suicide blog-bombers hitting Democrat-leaning blogs (and no doubt the agitator liberals picking at sites like Little Green Boogers), but also same-party partisans trying to score points in comments on various political blogs.

We saw a little of it in the last election on the various echo chamber sites, but now we're almost certain to see more professional operatives bringing their low-standards previous held only for television advertising into the new media of online interaction.

Oh I can hardly wait for all the new wrinkles this will bring to the karma-points circle jerks on the überblogs of the left.

Is the golden age over? Are we doomed to drag the internet down to the mainstream media advertising level? Personally, as a not-much-of-a-reader-any-more of the so-called A-list blogger/pundits, I don't expect such developments to affect me very much. But who knows? This community blog has known its moments of respectable traffic, and had some pretty incredible contributors breaking out the sharp knives few others will even acknowledge.

Yet it will be interesting how the efforts to manufacture consent in various online communities plays out when the Beltway Pros really get involved.

One thing is clear: the Dems announcing this week seem to know themselves. Barack Obama was simple and direct, without playing into the star image he's acquired of late. Hillary Clinton's announcement was smoother and more relaxed than I could ever have imagined. And Bill Richardson pretty much won me over on This Week this morning -- I never knew he was so charismatic and could be so incisive about the issues.

None of these evaluations are meant as an endorsement, not that anyone cares what I think. I remain an independent, pretty much distrusting everything coming from within two hours' drive from the Mall.

I admit I am curious about how the blog campaigns will be professionalized, though. Todays question: How true is John Edwards' image? Let's sling some comments and pass the time. It's only 21 months and change until election day!

Via Romanesko, I see that Peter Scheer has this idea on how to "save" newspapers:

Here's my proposal: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.

A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information.

I imagine the opposite. Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems that you don't make information more valuable by making it inaccessible.

Imagine the major Web portals -- Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN -- with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from "mainstream" media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap. And the portals know from unhappy experience (most recently in the case of Yahoo) just how difficult it is to create original and timely news content themselves.

Just what we need: A less informed populace.

Participating newspapers must be careful to limit their agreement to just one issue: the duration of the embargo. All other competitive issues -- subscription policies, how much to charge for different types of access (print and online) and to whom (consumers and Internet aggregators) -- must be strictly off-limits.

This all sounds a bit Standard Oil to me.

The problem is that the newspapers are trying to force the market to accommodate the business, much like the movie studios and music conglomerates are fighting against internet innovation because it threatens middle-management job security.

What's more, by all accounts, newspapers are still making money. It's just that they aren't the blockbuster earners on Wall Street like pharmaceuticals.

Many years ago, local sports teams decided that television was costing them money, so the NFL passed rules that prevented local games from being aired unless the game was sold out. Then baseball got into the action, selling their games not to the local station but to pay-per-view. The net effect was that fewer local would-be fans got to see their teams. The die-hard fans paid close attention, but the casual fans did not know who was who. Interest in the teams dropped. (Between unavailable games, strikes and the ego sportsmanship of modern athletes, I gave up baseball watching habits forged when I was four years old, watching with my grandmother.)

Now Mr. Scheer encourages newspapers to give in to their fears of the internet, much like sports teams have feared "free" television. If they do that, they will shut out the casual reader — especially the younger generations that represent the newspapers' future market. To hide their calling cards — the latest headlines — behind subscriptions would be to make news organizations invisible to the average user.

That's not going to help any newspaper.

If newspapers want to make more money online, they need to create better value. I don't think the answer is to prevent people from getting free news, but rather to add value, such as enhanced content, in-depth articles, video, high-resolution photography, and place that behind a subscription wall.

After all, you can stop shoplifting by locking the doors, but you won't be doing any business, either.

You know the mainstream media doesn't tell you everything it knows. That's obvious. Some of the reasons why are obvious, too: limited space in newspapers, limited time on news programs, limited resources of news departments, limited number of reporters.... Some things are bound to slip through the cracks.

Like the things back then.

But you have to wonder if those reasons are sufficient for the utter lack of substantive coverage of these following stories.

Top 25 Censored news stories of 2007

1. Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
2. Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
3. Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
4. Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
5. High-Tech Genocide in Congo
6. Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
7. US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
8. Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
9. The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
10. Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
11. Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
12. Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
13. New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
14. Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
15. Chemical Industry is EPA's Primary Research Partner
16. Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
17. Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
18. Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
19. Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
20. Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
21. Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
22. $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
23. US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
24. Cheney's Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
25. US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

What this amounts to is a list of 25 stories that alternative media will have to pick up. Come on, bloggers, pick one and write about it. Because the New York Times won't write about it. And Fox News won't talk about it.