ABC NEWS COMES UNDER FIRE FOR TABLOID STYLE DEBATE QUESTIONS

GUARDIAN BLOG CLASSES IT "WORST. DEBATE. EVER."

Two ABC News reporters were criticized for the quality of the debate questions they posed to the two senators competing for the Democratic nomination for the US presidency. Some critics have said the questions were reminiscent of the kind of exaggerations and innuendo typical of "character-assassination" campaigns waged by Republican operatives in other election cycles.

Demonstrators outside ABC-parent Disney's Burbank headquarters carrying signs reading "restore the Fourth Estate" implied the performance was part of an ongoing "dumbing down" of the American press.

Sen. Barack Obama was asked about whether he has personal ties to an individual linked to the Weather Underground, a 1960s radical group that had at times planted bombs. Obama had made the acquaintance of Bill Ayers in the process of community organizing in Chicago, hardly a sign of political weakness or poor judgment, much less an issue for public debate. At best, this sort of inquiry is a "juicy tidbit" for a one on one interview, not fodder for a serious intellectual debate on national issues.

Greg Mitchell wrote for the Huffington Post:
In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years. ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous focused mainly on trivial issues as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia. They, and their network, should hang their collective heads in shame.
Will Bunch, a blogger for the Philadelphia Daily News, wrote "I am still angry at what I just witnessed, so angry that it's hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking",adding "that was no way to promote democracy".

In a shocking revelation about how ABC News "crafted" the debate now decried as one of the worst examples of yellow journalism in modern TV history, Bunch reports the network actually sought out one video questioner directly, after having learned of her obsession with the "issue" of whether candidates "believe in the American flag". The network planted her as a character interrogator, playing to perhaps a specific demographic, or obsessively keeping to James Carville's 24-year-old riff on the industrial state with "Alabama" in the middle.

Hence Bunch classing the debate as a "travesty of a mockery of a sham of a presidential debate". The story here is that one of America's major news networks has sacrificed its respectability in a comprehensive and deliberate way in exchange for the opportunity to use a presidential debate forum as a petty tabloid smear chamber.

WEB 3.0 MUST MAKE INFORMATION MORE FREE, THE INDIVIDUAL MORE AUTONOMOUS

HotSpring.fm :: We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.

We must, as end-users, content creators, innovators and even pioneers in media and technology, consider that for very serious and transcendent reasons, this cannot be permitted to become true. Web 3.0 must be liberating, and it must expand, not shrink the freedom of information that stems from the First Amendment to the US Constitution, free and open society in general, a free press specifically, and the Internet’s empowerment of the individual.

If we are to be a global society, or a “globalized” society, if we are to have a planetary consciousness, or benefit from the “village” dynamic inherent in global trade and telecommunications, then we must ensure that individual freedoms are not limited by global media powers or by governments who think there is something expedient about limiting media freedoms. When freedom of information is restricted, human beings suffer, in real terms, and economic vitality is slowed and economic resilience damaged. [Full Story]

NET NEUTRALITY: A NECESSARY PRINCIPLE FOR MAINTAINING GLOBAL DEMOCRATIC STANDARDS

THE OPEN INTERNET IS A FORCE FOR DEMOCRACY & OPEN GOV'T, NOW IT IS UNDER THREAT FROM THOSE WHO WISH TO BOTTLENECK THE FREE PRESS

The concept of 'net neutrality' refers to the current state of affairs in the free democracies of the world, where those who control the physical infrastructure of the Internet are not allowed to police its content or to charge for provider-user access. It is a vital ingredient in the make-up of the Internet, because it guarantees the freedom of information that makes the web so useful to free society and so valuable to those who do well what works in that open environment.

But the US House of Representatives last year voted to end net neutrality with the COPE Act (Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement). The language of COPE would permit major telecommunications companies to control what content their subscribers would be allowed to see. It would allow them to charge content-providers for 'visibility', or for speed of bandwidth, favoring not the most interesting material or the most thorough of reporters, but rather the wealthiest corporations in the media game.

The result would be: independent voices would be nearly stamped out by major players; bloggers would not be able to compete with major sites like Yahoo! or MSN, which would (one imagines) easily be able to pay the extra 'bandwidth access' fees the telecoms would assess; information would suffer from a 'mainstreaming' effect, whereby all prominent sites routinely feed the same language, taken from the sames sources, into the same type of news content, marginalizing more analytical or academic materials; the Internet would belong to the ISPs and not to its users, be they content-creators or end-users.

Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) has pointed out in hearings on the Senate floor that the 'Bell companies' had "literally nothing to do with" creating the internet. AT&T even enjoy the unique distinction of refusing to participate in its creation. They already charge at both ends of the Internet experience: both end-users and content-providers have to pay access fees to have a connection to the world wide web, which, incidentally, has been the most profitable area of the telecom sector over recent years.

The direct effect of any legislation permitting the currently prohibited practice of stratifying bandwidth to direct pre-paid content to more users would be to 'bottleneck' the free press. The First Amendment to the US Constitution specifies that: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Any law permitting the constraint of the freedom of access of people connecting to the Internet to information available across its fibers would be a very direct abridging of the freedom of speech and of the press.

The Internet has allowed the 'press', i.e., all media whereby information is distributed from those in the know to the People, to expand its freedom to unprecedented levels. This has been good for all involved, has helped involve ordinary citizens in the political process, has helped create unimaginable profits for business, has created a new digital economy where freedom of information is a basic foundational component. To create an Internet bottleneck, where all traffic is partitioned into the (minority) high-priced high-speed service and the (vast majority) marginal, slower-access fibers, is to squeeze the vast new digital media culture into a space that cannot adequately serve its needs.

Net neutrality is the only way we can know that there are not more dirty tricks being played by political figures whose ideas we do not share, the only way we can ensure that research that is helpful to all people, but is poorly funded, be available to those in a position to use it for the good, the only way we can be sure that information which would not fit the predetermined 'official' chronicle of events be able to surface and play its necessary role in public life.

In short, without net neutrality, the Internet is just cable television with a very limited visual landscape and a slower pace. And cable television suffers from one fatal flaw: everything is bought and paid for, leaving nearly zero room for any content of a strictly humanitarian or civic nature. A free society needs that information to exist, and ours has not only created the platform to allow for it inexpensively and on a vast scale, but we have adjusted to the digital realm in such a way that we now require the Internet to maintain that type of information flow. [s]

RUPERT MURDOCH WINS BID TO BUY DOW JONES

BANCROFT FAMILY SHAREHOLDERS GIVE ENOUGH SUPPORT TO LET DEAL GO THROUGH, MURDOCH WILL CONTROL WALL STREET JOURNAL

Controversial media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, through his company Newscorp, has reportedly persuaded the Bancroft family, which holds a controlling interest in the financial company Dow Jones, to sell the firm for $5.6 billion, giving him control of the Wall Street Journal newspaper. Until now, there had been opposition from within the Bancroft family, based on concerns Murdoch would distort the editorial culture and diminish the Journal's reputation for journalistic independence.

Murdoch has reportedly employed a no-pressure method of persuasion, raising the offer, and giving time for the editorial environment of the Journal to express and debate all competing views on the matter. He has reportedly assured the current ownership and board of Dow Jones that he will not interfere with the editorial choices of the Wall Street Journal. [Full Story]

ECONOMY STRONG OR REPORTING WEAK?

IHT STORY SUGGESTS US ECONOMIC GROWTH SAVING WORLD MARKETS FROM TAILSPIN

I was amazed to see an article entitled "Strong U.S. economy helps slow drop in world markets", knowing that the dollar is falling, people are struggling to make ends meet, we're constantly hearing about bankruptcies on the rise, and the housing market is, well, in free-fall, with major lenders under investigation for lending-to-loot. The story was based on figures reported by the US Commerce Department, which had just reported (Friday) that the "US economy" (ostensibly, GDP) had grown by 3.4 % in the 2nd quarter of 2007, even as world markets looked down a steep slope due to fears of a global credit crisis.

I had just spoken to a friend whose husband and father work in real estate, who complained of the poor state of things, and the impossibility of selling anything that had increased in value in recent years. Just after seeing the story, I spoke to a financial professional who expressed surprise, telling me his assessment was that GDP could not have been far above 1.5 %, if taken as an annual measure. We discussed the tendency of federal agencies, over the past several years, to issue such reports, then some weeks later to (much less visibly) publish "revisions", normally cutting positive figures in half. [Full Story]

BILL PRESENTED TO PREVENT GOV'T TAMPERING WITH SCIENCE

Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) is to introduce an amendment to legislation currently under debate, which would restrict the executive branch's ability to gag scientists, manipulate their findings or demote those who disagree with official policy. The legislation would also require that scientists appointed to investigatory panels be selected for their credentials, not their political views. Similar legislation is pending before the Senate.

The new legislation is an effort to prevent the executive branch from covering up or re-shaping scientific findings that do not match its preconceived political strategies. It also seeks to protect scientists who blow the whistle on government missteps or past scientific misconceptions. [Full Story]