Media reform still incomplete. Commissioner Copps speaks out on TV responsibility to broadcast from political conventions. Free registration required NYTimes. The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Show Me the Convention: "Let's remember that American citizens own the public airwaves, not TV executives. We give broadcasters the right to use these airwaves for free in exchange for their agreement to broadcast in the public interest. They earn huge profits using this public resource. During this campaign season broadcasters will receive nearly $1.5 billion from political advertising. What do we get in return for granting TV stations free use of our airwaves? Unfortunately, when it comes to coverage of issues important to our nation, the answer is less and less. Coverage of the 2000 presidential election on the network evening news dropped by a third compared to reporting on the 1996 election. During the last election cycle we heard directly from presidential candidates for an average of 9 seconds a night on the news. Local races? Forget it. In 2002 - the most recent midterm elections - more than half of local newscasts contained no campaign coverage at all. Local coverage has diminished to the point that campaign ads outnumber campaign stories by four to one. What coverage there is focuses inordinately on polls and handicapping the horse race. TV executives tell us that the convention and campaign coverage provided by the cable channels is sufficient. I don't think so. Around 35 million Americans don't get cable, often because they cannot afford it. To put it in perspective, that's more than the combined populations of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Furthermore, broadcasters legally undertake to serve the public interest themselves in exchange for free spectrum - their licenses don't allow them to pass the buck to cable. Remember also that the vast majority of cable channels are national, not local. So don't look for local campaign coverage on cable, except in the few towns where local cable news exists. Most Americans still must look to their local broadcaster for news of local campaigns and issues"

News is what the audience makes it, as well as what the news media wants it to be. Young people are going for news tempered by irony. The Daily Show continues to capture eyeballs.

And a recent Pew Center survey found that one in five young Americans turns to late night comedic programs like "The Daily Show" for campaign news, just behind newspapers. "We talk a lot about young people being disengaged from politics," said Paul Mitchell, 34, political director for EdVoice, a Sacramento-based education advocacy group. "They are tuning in, they're just not using the same tools and means their parents did," he said. "They may not be able to tell the difference between Tom Brokaw and Walter Cronkite, but they have these URLs saved on their computers and they're engaging that way."

From the SacBee

Tools, resources. This is a good site for journalists to know about. It tracks spin and disinformation in the public sphere. It is a bit like hoax busters. Disinfopedia - Disinfopedia

Free speech. Here is a chilling story by Bob Barr, former representative and lawyer. He served on the Judiciary Committee. If he sounds the alarm about what the FBI is doing regarding people who might protest publically about a variety of matters, we better listen. t r u t h o u t - Bob Barr | Chilling Political Speech

Sheep pine for absent friends: official | The Register

Social effects of Internet. My idols ae profiled here.Wired 12.09: Weapons of Mass Mobilization

Off message. This is not about technology, but news. Here is a statement from Dr. Will Kennedy Smith, who has just gotten notified that he is being sued for sexual harassment in Chicago. Dr. Smith is head of Center for International Rehabilitation and has been doing some political work around the issue of the rights of the disabled, including a report to the U.N. as the International Disability Rights Monitor and Physicians Against Land Mines. It is unfortunate that this work will be ignored by mainstream media in favor of the more salacious, but unproven charges in the civil suit. Statement dated 8/25/04

Dr. Smith can not respond in person as he is currently at the United Nations presenting a landmark report on the situation of people with disabilities to the UN Ad Hoc Committee on an International Convention on the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities. Statement from Dr. Smith and CIR The Center for International Rehabilitation (“CIR”) and its President Dr. William Kennedy Smith today denounced allegations made by ex-employee Audra Soulias in a lawsuit filed today. The organization and Dr. Smith characterized the allegations made by Ms. Soulias as outrageous, untrue and without merit. Ms. Soulias has demanded payment of 3 million dollars. A disgruntled employee who had failed to receive a promotion during a corporate reorganization last year approached a number of former employees, including Ms. Soulias, who last worked at the CIR in 1999. The two then detailed the allegations in Ms. Soulias lawsuit and subsequently demanded millions of dollars in payments from Dr. Smith and the CIR. The CIR has issued the following statement, “Despite the time, energy and resources that will be needlessly wasted fighting these allegations, the organization cannot in any way endorse her claims or agree to her unwarranted demands.” Said Dr. Smith, “Unfortunately, my family and my personal history have made me unusually vulnerable to these kinds of allegations. I am saddened to think of the destructive impact this may have on the work and current employees of the CIR.” Ms. Soulias’s attempts to extract money from the CIR and Dr. Smith are especially unfortunate because of their potential impact on the work of the organization and its mission to assist people with disabilities in post-conflict countries. Since its founding in 1997, the CIR has been at the forefront of efforts to improve the conditions of landmine survivors and other people with disabilities in low income and post-conflict areas. In July 2001, the CIR introduced the world’s first distance learning course in artificial limb construction. Today, the program is being delivered to 29 clinics in six mine-affected countries. In Latin America alone, the CIR distance-learning program provides training to 45 prosthetists working at 15 rehabilitation clinics that treat approximately 4,000 patients annually. The CIR also operates a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) to develop artificial limbs and wheelchairs for mine-affected countries. The RERC has been designated a national center of excellence in rehabilitation engineering by the U.S. National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research. As part of its engineering activities, the CIR, in collaboration with noted wheelchair architect and user Ralf Hotchkiss, has developed a wheelchair for use in Afghanistan and other conflict-affected countries. The chair, which is currently in production in India, is distributed in the form of a wheelchair “kit” that can be assembled and fitted locally. This approach combines the economies of scale and quality assurance of mass production with the point of service care and local capacity building of cottage industry manufacturing. This month alone, the CIR will deliver 100 of these specially designed, durable and adjustable wheelchairs to the Afghan Ministry of Martyrs and Disabled in Kabul. There, workers will assemble, fit and distribute the wheelchairs.  The CIR participates with the Ministry in training the local workers on assembly, use, and repair of the chairs. The CIR’s work in Afghanistan, however, goes beyond the distribution of wheelchairs. The organization has assisted the interim government in establishing a national disability coordinating council which was crucial to recently passed legislation supporting the rights of people with disabilities in the country. Abdullah Wardak Minister of Disabled and Martyrs for Afghanistan has said: “The work of Dr. Smith and the CIR has been invaluable to the Ministry, helping us to meet the overwhelming needs of Afghanistan’s disability community. We hope their work, and this fruitful collaboration, will continue well into the future. I know Dr. Smith personally and have been impressed by his integrity and commitment to his work.” Disability activists also voiced support for Dr. Smith. Maria Veronica Reina, who heads the CIR’s International Disability Rights Monitoring (IDRM) program said: “I am proud to be working with the CIR. I have been with the organization for two years and we are making good progress. If you work hard you will get ahead in this organization. As a woman with a disability, I can tell you this is not always the case. Dr. Smith has been kind, thoughtful and professional in every interaction that I have witnessed. Over the past several months our team has worked long hours together preparing the IDRM report for the Americas. A group of disability researchers from 22 countries worked for over a year to pull it together. It would be a shame if our work were overshadowed by this kind of attack.”

Edited 9/13/04 to remove a quote attributed to Holly Biron, which she said was fabricated.

Blogs and blogging. Blogging the political conventions part deux. Here come the conservative bloggers to cover the Republican convention. It seems like the story of the convention in NYC could end up being the bloggers, if things keep up.WSJ.com - Meet the Bloggers, Part Two

ISP bluesfor BugMeNot, the site I just told my colleagues about. It was booted offline, but now is back online. When someone like a Journalism teacher is busy checking out online news and comes across a site that requires registration, BugMeNot is a quick alternative. Instead of scrolling through the often multiple page registration form, one goes to BugMeNot, and types in the site URL. Bug then generates a user identification so you can just get to the article you want to read. I'm not against registering for sites like the NY Times that I use all the time, but when there is an interesting story in a local paper that I may never look at again, BugMeNot is the time-saving solution. Wired News: BugMeNot Gets Booted, Restored

RFID and your privacy. A good idea, putting RFID chips into people like Altzheimer's patients who might wonder, or tuna fish to keep track of where the schools are, could go bad if it ends in ubiquitious personal surveillance. This is an issue that needs to be considered and talked about before commercial pressure just makes it happen everywhere. Human chips more than skin-deep - News - ZDNet

Church and state, journalistically speaking. Here's a new wrinkle in breaking down the boundary that should exist between news and advertising. Wired News covers this story.

It's not surprising that marketers love IntelliTxt while many journalists despise it. AlwaysOn columnist Rafe Needleman called IntelliTxt "pretty bad news" from an ethics standpoint "because it blurs the line between editorial content, which readers should expect to be free of commercial influence, and advertising, which we know is paid-for and biased." In AdAge, Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, compared the technology to "product placement," while Doug Feaver, editor of washingtonpost.com and president of the Online News Association, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he refuses to consider IntelliTxt because for a publication to maintain credibility the lines between ads and news must be "as clear and distinct as possible." When Vibrant Media pitched its product to Wired News, editors also gave it the thumbs down. A chief concern was that rational cynics might suspect that Wired News was loading its stories with keywords like "memory," "video games" and "impotent" just to make an extra buck.

Blogs and blogging. Barb is back from Florida, unscathed by Charlie, and what should be in the news, but blogs and their use as a tool for teaching. Elementary teachers can use them, so I expect that college profs need to roll up their sleeves and get busy with blogs too. Read the NY Times article (free registration required.)

RFID hacking.Forbes.com: A Hacker's Guide To RFID

A bit from Dan Gillmor's new book, "We the Media." (registration required)MercuryNews.com | 08/01/2004 | We the media: "Journalists: We will learn we are part of something new, that our readers/listeners/viewers are becoming part of the process. I take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more than I do -- and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of journalistic life. Every reporter on every beat should embrace this. We will use the tools of grassroots journalism or be consigned to history. Our core values, including accuracy and fairness, will remain important, and we'll still be gatekeepers in some ways, but our ability to shape larger conversations -- and to provide context -- will be at least as important as our ability to gather facts and report them."