I.F. Stone: Is His Friendly Ghost Hovering Over Us?

New educational documentary about Izzy Stone. Short vid on "the 'children' of I.F. Stone."

Margaret Sanger, flawed hero

Sanger is proof that heroes, including media heroes, are often flawed. This article from Women's E-News discusses her flirtation with eugenics-oriented arguments in support of birth control in the early 1920s.

Dinner with Amy

In the early 1900s, the socialist Appeal to Reason newspaper offered yachts, fruit farms and motorcycles as premiums to bring in revenue and subscriptions. Democracy Now! offers Dinner and Show with Amy Goodman. 

Where are today's Upton Sinclairs? Colbert?

Stephen Colbert accepted the challenge of experiencing difficult working conditions as a farm worker. Here he is doing farm labor.

Or is it Barbara Ehrenreich, who worked at low wage jobs (waitress, maid, Wal-Mart employee) for her book Nickel and Dimed to see if she could make ends meet?

Students Carry On the Ida B. Wells Tradition

In last dozen years, Northwestern University journalism students, law students and their professors were instrumental in proving the innocence of many prisoners in Illinois, several of whom had been sentenced to death. Their investigative journalism ultimately sparked the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois in 2011.

Lynching prompted the classic Billie Holiday song,"Strange Fruit," which she recorded independently in 1939 -- getting around the objections of Columbia, her record company: "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." It ultimately became her biggest selling record. Time magazine denounced the song as a "piece of musical propaganda." The song's lyrics were inspired by this photograph of a 1930 lynching in Indiana.

Re Legacy: No schools are named after newspaper editors because they ignored or apologized for racist lynchings. But Ida B. Wells has a high school named after her (school home page here) in San Francisco (just across the park from the famous "painted ladies" Victorian houses.)

Journalists Sometimes Have to Refight Old Battles

Dissident journalists of the past exposed many social problems (like the labor weeklies spotlighting the problem of people being jailed simply for being in debt) and brought about reform. Debtors prisons were abolished. But other journalists --  years or generations later -- may have to keep exposing the issue . . . as these investigative journalists for the big mainstream daily in Minneapolis recently did.

"It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found."

I.F. Stone pointed out that some reforms don't happen except through the work of generations of journalists and democracy activists: 

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing - for the sheer fun and joy of it - to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.”

Early Dissident Newspapers Were NOT Reader-Friendly

See crowded layout of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist publication, The Liberator, here and here. Not exactly HuffingtonPost. No half-naked actresses. Cady Stanton's/Anthony's feminist publication, The Revolution, was almost as dense.  Content was king (OR QUEEN) back then.

2008 Debate: Are Blogs Ruining Sports Journalism?

Loud and very dated 2008 debate between newspaper/magazine journalist Buzz Bissinger ("Friday Night Lights") and founding editor Will Leitch of Deadspin.com, the sometimes raunchy sports blog/website. Debate aired on Bob Costas' HBO sports show.

Voice of San Diego et al

San Diego's independent, online news outlet published unique "Reporter Guidelines" in Sept 2011.
      Other outlets profiled by students were Global Voices Online, Buzzfeed, Salon.com, Fashionista.com, RookieMag, Barstool Sports, Center for Public Integrity, Gothamist (and its article on Jake Gyllenhaal subway sightings, The Nation, Truthout, Grist.org  (and posted video "If We Cared About the Environment Like We Care About Sports").

Internet Hoaxes

Question: Are younger educated people who were raised on the Internet LESS likely to be taken in by hoax emails such as Obama as "radical Muslim" than Jon Stewart's 80-year-old aunt? Or clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger as racist?

Lately, viral video hoaxes seem more common than text hoaxes -- like "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" hoax, which, unknown to ABC, was perpetrated by animation students using computer imaging in Montreal. And like "Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catchces Fire," which was a hoax perpetrated by the Jimmy Kimmel show as self-promotion. (NBC "Today" show interviewed me in 2013 about separating fact from fiction in media and Internet.)

Bestselling book, thanks to bloggers and Internet word-of-mouth

Do U.S. media stereotype Muslims and Arabs?

Professor Mohamad Elmasry says 'yes' in an Al Jazeera column. (H/t Emma R.)

Is U.S. Media System Failing Democracy?

Typical of similar academic studies over the years, a 2008 study compared the level of public knowledge about current events in Denmark, Finland, United Kingdom and the United States. It found that the countries where TV/radio is dominated by public broadcasting -- Denmark and Finland -- were the best informed. Our country, dominated by corporate commercial media, was the least informed. The study's authors suggest that differing media systems play a role in those results.

A 2003 study of public knowledge of facts related to the Iraq War found that misperceptions among U.S. residents (that evidence linked Iraq and al Qaeda; that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq; and that world public opinion favored the US invasion) were greatest among those whose primary info source was Fox News -- and least among those whose primary info source was public broadcasting. (A Pew poll taken in Aug. 2010 found that almost 1 in 5 Americans believed President Obama to be a Muslim; only 34% knew he is a Christian. 43% chose "don't know.")

Night(mare) in Tunisia . . . for Longtime Dictator

Tunisia is a small, Mediterranean country in North Africa.  Back in 2007, Tunisian citizen-journalists and bloggers had documented the tourism/shopping sprees of the dictator's wife aboard the presidential plane to Europe and global fashion capitals. (H/t Global Voices)

In 2010, the TuniLeaks website was set up to post (WikiLeaks-released) internal U.S. Embassy documents candidly exposing the corruption of Tunisia's dictatorship.

Fascinating photo (released by Ben Ali's office) of dictator Ben Ali visiting the hospital bed of the desperate young man who set himself on fire in protest in Dec. 2010 -- the young man didn't live long enough to learn that his act led to the overthrow of Ben Ali after sustained, Internet-fueled nonviolent protests. 

Amid the protests, Tunisian rapper El General put out this widely-circulated music video against Ben Ali that urged people to join protest. It led to his arrest for a few days. Soon after, the dictator fled. The song went on to become an anthem in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere.

U.S. jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie performs his classic jazz tune "Night in Tunisia," first recorded in 1944.

OhMyNews TV reporter . . .

. . . tries to get answers in Dec 2013 from a former South Korean president who appointed a discredited director of the National Intelligence Service. That spy chief faced legal charges that he'd meddled in the 2012 presidential election on behalf of the winning conservative candidate through a covert Internet effort to smear opposition candidates. The reporter asked the former president: Do you feel responsible as a person who appointed Won to this post? Soon after this TV report, the spy chief was convicted of graft.  

Were Trillion$ Hidden from Taxes Thanks to HSBC Bank?

One of biggest bank scandals in history was exposed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the nonprofit, Washington-DC based Center for Public Integrity. HSBC is the world's second largest bank.

President Caught on Video: "Get Lost, You A*#hole"

In 2008, then-President of France Nicolas Sarkozy was caught on video calling a disgruntled citizen an "idiot" or "dumbass" or "a**hole" (depending on translation). French politicians are having difficulty tolerating the scrutiny of online coverage (including online video) -- especially compared to deferential coverage they're accustomed to from traditional media.

A former U.S. president (then governor of Texas) caught on video.

Mexico's "Yo Soy 132" Youth Movement Erupted in 2012

This Internet-driven movement didn't alter the outcome of Mexico's July 2012 presidential election -- since the candidate being "imposed" by the two major TV networks ended up winning.  But the student activists of Yo Soy 132 had impact; they set up an historic presidential debate that was carried online (the TV-promoted frontrunner, Enrique Pena Nieto, was the only candidate who didn't up).  It was this YouTube video that launched the movement, after a campus protest had embarrassed Pena Nieto.

Global Voices Online

Global Voices is a community of more than 1200 writers, bloggers, experts and translators around the world who post reports from blogs and citizen media, emphasizing "voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media." For example, this 2014 Vlog post on Latin American subway musicians & performers. Or, a win for activists in Brazil.  

This 2011 post features short videos from a competition on gender equality in the Ukraine.

This 2010 post features a public protest by a brave professor and blogger in China, offering himself as a slave.

Video cameras and blogging for human rights

Launched in 1992 with the help of musician Peter Gabriel, the nonprofit Witness.org began distributing video cameras in hopes of minimizing human rights abuses. Now they help and train people in the safe use of cell phones and cameras to record abuses. Their slogan: "See it. Film it. Change it."

The Israeli human rights group, B'Tzelem, provides cameras to Palestinians so they can record Israeli settlers who harass Palestinians, including incidents of intimidation in and around the Palestinian city of Hebron, which rightwing Israeli religious settlers believe God has bequeathed to Jews.

Vancouver Film School students created an inspiring video, "Iran, A Nation of Bloggers," and put it online months before the tech-fueled protests over Iran's disputed 2009 election.

Egyptian bloggers & Interent activists paved the way for 2011 uprising

With the Mubarak dictatorship in control of all major media in Egypt, brave Egyptian "citizen journalists" risked imprisonment and torture to blog or tweet about human rights abuses. Here's renowned Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas interviewed on BBC in January 2010. Over the years, Abbas was harassed, censored and assaulted by authorities -- and was briefly detained in Feb 2011 during the uprising.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous covered the 18-day uprising in 2011 for Democracy Now!, and he was the central character in an HBO documentary about the Egyptian revolution. For his work in Egypt, he was awarded (on I.C. campus in April 2012) the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media.  (Here's a paperback "Tweets from Tahrir.")

In June, 2010, Khaled Said was beaten to death by police in public for the crime of Internet use and, apparently, exposing police corruption. His martyrdom inspired protests and Internet organizing that led to the uprising six months later that ended the Mubarak dictatorship. Middle East-based Google exec and activist Wael Ghonim set up the galvanizing "We Are All Khaled Said" Facebook page in Arabic.  (Here's an English FB version of "We Are All Khaled Said.")

Tavi Gevinson -- fashion blogger at 11, editor-in-chief at 15

This interview was recorded when fashion blogger Tavi was 15, and had founded Rookie. At age 16, she appeared on Colbert Report. By age 17, she was costarring in the Hollywood movie, "Enough Said." Last year, at age 18, she became a Broadway actress, starring opposite Michael Cera.

I visited a strange place that stripped me of 45 mins of my life (Upworthy)

Upworthy.com promotes social/political issues virally through clever headlines and visuals or video, like this animation on advertising/media impact on girls.

Winners of First Izzy Award: Glenn Greenwald & Amy Goodman

Soon after accepting their Izzy Awards in Ithaca in March 2009, Greenwald and Goodman spoke about independent media on public TV's Bill Moyers' Journal.

The Battle over WikiLeaks

In Dec. 2010, blogger Glenn Greenwald (a WikiLeaks supporter) explained independent journalism to a CNN correspondent. WikiLeaks website is here. This leaked video (with more than 15 million YouTube views) shows the killing of employees of the Reuters news agency and wounding of children by US attack helicopters in Iraq.

Photo above was taken in August 2012 when I visited the Ecuadoran embassy in London (WikiLeaks' founder had taken refuge inside); I was there days after the British government threatened to invade the embassy . . . a serious breach of international law.

Following in WikiLeaks footsteps is a new U.S.-based group ExposeFacts.org (of which I'm an advisor).

Local Nonprofit Watchdog News Sites

As dailies have shrunk, local online nonprofit news sites have sprouted, such as the well-funded VoiceofSanDiego.org and the professionally-staffed MinnPost.com ("a thoughtful approach to news"). Across the country, local watchdog outlets are trying to figure out how to survive, reported Jodi Enda in a 2012 piece for American Journalism Review.