Web Censorship/Persecution in China

After Yahoo provided info to China's government that led to 10-year prison sentences for two Chinese dissidents beginning in 2003 and 2005, the families of the victims (Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao) sued Yahoo. As a result, Yahoo announced in 2008 that it had established a fund for people persecuted or jailed in China for posting political views online. Too little, too late?

In response to demands from China's government, Google agreed in June 2010 to quit automatically switching its users in China to Google's uncensored Hong Kong search site. But there's a tab users can click to be switched. Should Chinese citizens feel safe when hitting that tab?

Web Censorship in the USA

In 2008, the media reform group Free Press highlighted media and telecom corporations who'd recently been caught censoring web or cellphone traffic.

Inner City Press, a monitor of Wall Street and the United Nations, was temporarily delisted from Google News. The de-listing happened soon after Matt Lee of Inner City Press challenged Google over its commitment to free expression.

I.C. grad Kate Sheppard at HuffPost reports on . . .

. . . reduction of environment reporters and enviromental coverage at NPR. 

Tom Tomorrow, editorial cartoonist

The chaining of alternative weeklies can undermine alternative cartoonists like "Tom Tomorrow"/Dan Perkins.

A Victory for Bloggers' Access to Courts

In March 2012, a Massachusetts court ruled that bloggers deserve the same privileges in covering courts and trials as traditional media.

Can Pay Walls Around Online News Content Help Save Newspapers?

No, says Arianna Huffington, as she testifies on "The Future of Journalism & Newspapers" before the U.S. Senate in May 2009 (at 59:02). And here's "Life After the Pay Wall" nightmare scenario from Advertising Age.  (A former indy media student complained about Boston Globe's paywall around the Globe's editorial.)

Pre-financing of "Iraq for Sale" documentary

This Robert Greenwald documentary was funded mostly by small donors BEFORE the movie was made -- an example of grassroots pre-financing of a work that had real impact.

(Brave New Film's latest documentary -- "Unmanned: America's Drone Wars" -- was screened on Capitol Hill, accompanied by Pakistani civilians who testified about having survived U.S. drone strikes.) 

Pre-financing of journalism or media projects

A new project, Beacon, hopes to fund freelance writers by seeking donations of $5 per month; in return, donors have access to all articles on Beacon. Here is NY Times write-up.

Kickstarter.com is "a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..." A key aspect of Kickstarter and similar funding platforms is "All or Nothing funding."

On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.

Here was a successful Kickstarter fundraising drive in 2013 that saved a local movie theater. Here's a documentary movie project that I'm a tiny part of, which has used Kickstarter successfully.

Singer/songwriter Jill Sobule . . .

. . . raised $75,000 in small donations from her fans in 2008 to pay for professional recording fees to produce her next album. Here's one of her semi-hits, "I Kissed a Girl," (not to be confused with Katy Perry song that came out a dozen years later).

Is power over the Web concentrating in a few corporate hands . . .

. . . as happened years earlier to the TV and newspaper and book publishing industries?  According to Michael Wolff in the Sept. 2010 issue of Wired: "the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010."

Brave New Films Co-founder Says: "The Internet Is My Religion"

Intensely personal 2011 speech from Brave New Films' Jim Gilliam (who was raised a conservative Christian evangelical) discussing how the Internet offered him salvation -- and literally saved his life.

Some journalists expose problems, others report on fixing them

A non-profit project funded by big, mainstream foundations -- the Solutions Journalism Network -- says it will focus on journalism that points toward solutions (Sojo).

"Bloggers Bring In Big Bucks"

This Business Week slideshow in July 2007 summarized some of the most (financially) successful early blogs covering technology, fashion, celebs, politics. Almost all are still successful today. (Here is the intro to the slideshow.)

Paul Krassner and "The Realist"

The leading satire publication of the underground press from late1950s through 1970s and beyond -- a Mad magazine for adults -- was The Realist. A famous Realist poster from 1963. My humble contribution in 1994.

Can journalists/columnists with strong political ideologies . . .

. . . still engage in independent commentary -- as opposed to partisan propaganda? Here's some critical commentary from the conservative National Review Online within hours of John McCain selecting Sarah Palin as his running-mate in August 2008. (This isn't the drumbeat GOP cheerleading one might get from a less independent source like Fox News at that crucial juncture.)

Glenn Greenwald answers absurd question from elite TV "journalist"

In June 2013, Meet the Press host David Gregory asked Greenwald a question based on false assumptions and ending: "Why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" He got a loud answer.

Cops vs. Journalists Covering 'Occupy Wall Street' Movement 2011-2012

HARASSMENT OF JOURNALISTS COVERING OCCUPY MOVEMENT: Citizen journalist with video camera tapes himself apparently getting shot by police rubber bullet while covering a seemingly peaceful moment during Occupy Oakland (CA) protests.  At Occupy Nashville, a reporter for the long-established weekly Nashville Scene was arrested for violating a curfew imposed by Tennessee's governor (a night judge questioned whether that's legal), was threatened with a "resisting arrest" charge, and was ultimately charged with "public intoxication." Nashville's big daily reported on the dubious arrest.

Between Sept 2011 and Sept 2012, more than 90 journalists (both independent and mainstream) were arrested while covering Occupy protests in the U.S. -- as tracked by Josh Stearns of the media reform group Free Press.  Removing journalists and citizen journalists from the scene seemed to be a strategy because acts of police brutality -- when recorded by citizen journalists and ubiquitous cameras & cells -- led to more sympathy and activists for the movement: for example, in NY City and at University of California, Davis. Like in the 1960s, the federal government built a large surveillance apparatus to surveill Occupy activists. 

"THE MAYOR'S AFRAID OF YOU TUBE": In October 2011, hours after New York City authorities made a last-minute decision NOT to clear protesters from the original Occupy Wall Street site in Zucotti Park/Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan, filmmaker Michael Moore said this to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell (begin 2:54 for context):

"One cop down there actually today. I asked...'Why don't you think the eviction happened?' And he said, 'Cause the Mayor's afraid of You Tube.'...The power of the new media, the media that's in the hands of the people -- that those in charge are afraid of what could possibly go out."

Recent harassment of indy journalists

Since the 1960s when the FBI and local police engaged in violence and continuous harassment against "underground weeklies," repression against dissenting U.S. outlets has decreased but certainly not ended. Case in point: the 2008 Republican Convention in Minnesota. Three years later, the journalists' suit against the police was settled, with $100,000 in compensation being paid by the St. Paul and Minneapolis police departments and the Secret Service. The settlement included an agreement by the St. Paul police to implement a training program aimed at educating officers regarding the 1st Amendment rights of the press and public, including proper procedures for dealing with the journalists covering demonstrations.

Two Alternative Media Stars of 1960s

RAMPARTS: One of the most explosive indy magazines of the 1960s, Ramparts published photos of the impact of U.S. napalm (a chemical weapon that eats away human flesh) on Vietnamese civilians in Jan. 1967. Martin Luther King, Jr. credited those photos with being the spark that got him to break his silence and speak out loudly against the Vietnam War a few months later.  Besides its investigative scoops and idramatic story-telling, Ramparts was known for its cover art shown here and here.

"Dr. Hip": Syndicated widely to "underground weeklies," Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld dispensed blunt and humorous advice about sex (and drugs). That legacy is carried on by Dan Savage's "Savage Love" column in today's alternative weeklies.

Independent outlets in Russia facing government intiimidation

Russian government issues warning to an indy publicaton, which is publishing critical stories about Russian military involvement re Ukraine.

"Kill the Messenger" movie on investigative journalist Gary Webb

Here's my column on Webb and "Kill the Messenger" published Monday.  Here's the movie's official website & trailer.

Margaret Sanger -- flawed heroine

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 Goodman

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 a Show with Amy Goodman.    (After meeting Amy at a dinner party, Regis and his sidekick acknowledge that their Regis and Kelly TV show is about "nothing.")

Is Colbert today's Upton Sinclair?

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 today carry on Ida B. Wells' legacy

In last dozen years, Northwestern University journalism students and their professors have been 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 label: "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 Re-fight 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.”