ProPublica wants a more transparent government

The Office of Government Ethics is responsible for collecting and disclosing executive branch financial disclosure forms and ethical agreements. While the OGE's site lists which officials have completed the documents, it does not post the documents themselves. The 1978 Ethics in Government Act, which created OGE, forbids OGE from releasing the document.

"So ProPublica, the not yet year-old privately-supported non-profit investigative reporting shop, has taken it upon itself to plug the gap by requesting, collecting, and posting the documents for all to see."
-- Columbia Journalism Review

School strip-search case heads to SCOTUS

The case of a 13-year-old Arizonan girl who was traumatized when school officials strip-searched her looking for prescription drugs heads to the Supreme Court this week. SCOTUS will decide how easy it will be for school faculty to strip-search your child in the future.

Reinigorating public media -- online

Internews Network's Persephone Miel, a recent fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, thinks taxpayer-funded media -- PBS, NPR, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- should increase their online presence to more effectively serve the American people and their communities.

"There's a really strong sense both within the system, and certainly from a lot of critics, or not even so much critics, but people who want public media to succeed, and value it -- that public broadcasting has a huge potential role to play, as the media landscape shifts and as we shift into more and more online delivery and platform-Agnostic content," she said in an interview with reclaimthemedia.org. "But there's a really good chance that they're not going to seize that opportunity, and that [public broadcasters] could end up being completely irrelevant to the next wave of journalism -- which would be sad."

Miel also supports not-for-profit funding of public media: "Public media is supposed to be going where the people are, regardless of whether there's money there or not. So the fact that they don't seem to be looking for partnerships with local nonprofit-place bloggers or other things, trying to bring in that new stuff, now that they can -- it's kind of depressing."

CEO of TerraCycle to speak at IC

Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle -- the eco-company that has pioneered the concept that any disposable material can be reused and created into something of value -- will present, "TerraCycle: Revolution in a Bottle," on Thursday, April 23, at 7:00 p.m. in Textor Hall 102.

The company's flagship product, TerraCycle Plant Food™, is an all-natural, all-organic, 'goof-proof' liquid plant food made from waste (worm poop) and packaged in waste (reused soda bottles)! TerraCycle represents the ultimate eco-capitalism success story.

Can flashy new designs save newspapers?

Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation.

Utko was trained as an architect and has consulted newspapers in Poland, Austria, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia and Slovenia. He has received 22 awards in various design competitions, including "World's Best Designed Newspaper" for Puls Biznesu awarded by The Society for News Design in 2004.

Utko talks about his redesign strategy.

All-time low for FOX programming

FOX is hoping to cash in on the difficult economic situation many Americans find themselves in today. The network's upcoming series "Someone's Gotta Go," will pit employees of small businesses against one another. The losers get laid off.

UK's NHS spends at least £32m a year employing religious personnel

Figures obtained through the UK's Freedom of Information Act reveal that the UK's National Health Service spends upwards of £32 million a year employing hospital chaplains and other religious personnel. The National Secular Society claims this figure is actually closer to £40 million.

According to a money.com.uk article, "These religious provisions, funded by taxpayer money, could instead be used to pay for 1,300 extra nurses or 2,645 cleaners."

The NSS is calling on Health Minister Ben Bradshaw to reallocate the funds, and believes religious institutions -- not the taxpayer -- should foot the £32m a year bill.

Obama to host Seder

Come this Thursday Barack Obama will be the first U.S. President to attend the White House Seder. From Obama's schedule, released Tuesday:

On Thursday, President Obama will participate in an event at the White House where he will discuss the need to enhance the quality of healthcare afforded to members of our Armed Forces and our Veterans. The Press Secretary will brief in the afternoon. President Obama and his family will mark the beginning of Passover with a Seder at the White House with friends and staff.

The Jerusalem Post reports on the response to this story in the Jewish community.

H/t to ThinkProgress.

Reflections of a student activist

A student activist involved with the sit-in at NYU last February reflects on the experience and writes about the "new wave" of student activism.

The student run organization Take Back NYU! occupied the university's Kimmel Center for 46 hours, for which they were suspended. Take Back NYU! demands affordable education, power in their university, rights for campus workers, and support for students in Gaza.

Howard Dean draws a line in the sand on health care reform

Howard Dean sent an email message to MoveOn members today, announcing that he is campaigning with President Obama to win health care for all.

"Today, we draw a line in the sand," says Dean. "A public health insurance option is the only way to guarantee health care for all Americans. And to show that we mean business, we all need to tell Congress we won't settle for less. If 250,000 of you sign this petition, I will personally deliver it to Congress."

The petition asks Congress to give Americans the choice between either a universally available public health care option like Medicare or for-profit private insurance. Dean believes "A public option is the only way to guarantee health care for all Americans and its inclusion is non-negotiable. Any legislation without the choice of a public option is only insurance reform and not the health care reform America needs."

Izzy Award honors Goodman and Greenwald

Blogger Glenn Greenwald and Democracy Now! host and executive producer Amy Goodman received the first annual Izzy Award on March 31 at the State Street Theater in Ithaca, NY. The award was presented by Ithaca College's Park Center for Independent Media.

Both Greenwald and Goodman spoke to an audience of nearly 800 college students and local residents at the award ceremony. Their speeches touched on our nation's distorted concept of journalism and the independent media's adversarial relationship with mainstream corporate media.

"If you think about it, the term independent media is a strange term," said Greenwald. "The concept of independence is so inherent in what journalism is that if someone says 'independent journalism' it should strike us as a ridiculous redundancy."

Greenwald said that mainstream journalism is conducted in such a way that it is completely devoid of independence. Journalists working for corporate media tend to push conventional tripe as truth and call it journalism. Independent journalists -- especially bloggers -- have a responsibility to be adversarial to those in power, to question and undermine what the government and mainstream media is reporting, said Greenwald.

"Bloggers are a reaction to the things that mainstream journalists do," said Greenwald.

Greenwald believes that the definition of blogging goes beyond a content's format. Just because a mainstream journalists writes online does not mean he is blogging. Bloggers have a distinct and radically different mentality than other journalists. Unlike most journalists, bloggers tend not to be "meek, mindless and deferential."

Goodman's speech focused on the power of grassroots organizing for demanding change from the media and the government.

"Grassroots pressure has the ability to flash a spotlight on injustice and force change," she said.

While journalists will sometimes report the opinions of a minority group -- the "far left," for example -- they will take those viewpoints and isolate them in a quote or sound byte. Rarely does the media report on "the mechanisms for social change from which [those viewpoints] arose." This distorts or hides the full picture of political and ideological debate taking place within American society.

Goodman believes that if the American citizenry takes it into their own hands to make their voices heard, the mainstream media will be forced to respond and present a full spectrum of opinion.

"The media is most dangerous when people are aloud to speak for themselves," she said. "We need media that builds bridges between communities, not bombs bridges."

Goodman sees the media as a huge kitchen table, stretching across the globe, where people of different races, nations and cultures can discuss their communal issues.
She encouraged those in the audience to get involved in the political and social justice issues that matter to them most, so that their voices might be "brought to the table" and, hopefully, incite change. "Half of life is just showing up," she said, quoting Woody Allen.

O'Reilly harasses liberal blogger

Think Progress's managing editor Amanda Terkel claims she was harassed by one of Bill O'Reilly's producers attempting to score an ambush interview with her on March 21. O'Reilly was upset over a March 1 TP blog post by Terkel, which discussed a speech O'Reilly was scheduled to give at an Alexa Foundation fundraiser for rape victims. In that post Terkel mentioned controversial comments O'Reilly made during his radio show in August 2006 about about an 18-year-old woman who was raped and murdered.

The ambush interview with Terkel was aired on The O'Reilly Factor on March 23. In that segment, O'Reilly claimed that Think Progress and NBC news deliberately tried to cause pain and suffering for rape victims the Alexa Foundation was attempting to help. He also called Terkel a "villain."

Read Terkel's side of the story and watch the ambush interview here.

Think Progress has launched a campaign calling on advertisers that support The O'Reilly Factor to stop supporting "the O'Reilly harassment machine." Support the campaign by sending a letter to O'Reilly's corporate supporters.

IC campaign

I'm running for the VP of Communications position in Ithaca College's Student Government Association.

Learn more at the Fundamentalist Party site.

Obama's first gaffe?

After a near flawless campaign, Obama may have slipped up.

In an interview with Jay Leno on Thursday's Tonight Show, the President compared his bowling game to the Special Olympics. The conservative media -- most notably Rush Limbaugh -- made an issue of the comment, while Governor Schwarzenegger laughed it off.

Kite energy

The company Makani Power is building giant kite turbines that make solar panels and wind farms look so old-school.

A new solution for the energy and climate crises? Could 5 houses be powered by a kite the size of a grand piano?

Birth certificate requirement for future presidents?

Rep. Bill Posey, R-Florida, introduced a bill this Thursday requiring presidential candidates to produce a copy of their birth certificate. Posey wants the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to be amended to include the birth certificate requirement.

Democrats responded by accusing Posey of implying that President Obama is not really eligible to be in the White House. During the 2008 election, some Republican pundits questioned Obama's eligibility for the White House, even though Obama produced a Hawaiian birth certificate.

Posey, however, claims he's not attacking the current president.


"Opponents of President Bush used the 2000 election results and the court decisions to question the legitimacy of President Bush to serve as President," Posey said in a statement. "Opponents of President Obama are raising the birth certificate issue as a means of questioning his eligibility to serve as president. Neither of these situations are healthy for our Republic."

Top climatologists less optimistic than ever

The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the IPCC's 2007 report was overly optimistic. The predictions the IPCC made in 2007 about the rate of global warming were based off outdated data. New data has revealed that the effects of global warming will be even worse than previously thought.

A web exclusive from the Earth Island Journal has the full story.

New military policy ends an 18-year-old "form of censorship"

The NY Times reported yesterday that the news media will now be allowed to photograph the coffins of America’s war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States, so long as the families of the dead agree.

Santiago Lyon, the directory of photography for the AP, called the ban a form of censorship. “The public has a right to see and to know what their military is doing, and they have a right to see the cost of that military action,” he said.

The ban on photographs of coffins of war dead was established in 1991 by the first President Bush, after he was part of an embarrassing incident aired on live television. From the NY Times article:

"In 1989, the television networks showed split-screen images of Mr. Bush sparring and joking with reporters on one side and a military honor guard unloading coffins from a military action that he had ordered in Panama on the other.

Mr. Bush, a World War II veteran, was caught unaware and subsequently asked the networks to warn the White House when they planned to use split screens. The networks declined.

At the next opportunity, in February 1991 during the Persian Gulf war, the Pentagon banned photos of returning coffins."

For more information on the DOD coffin images policy, read Return of the Fallen, an article in The George Washington University's National Security Archive.

Tell the Supreme Court you don't support Proposition 8

More than 300,000 people have signed this letter telling the Supreme Court to invalidate Proposition 8. If you're not already against Proposition 8, watch the "Fidelity" video made by Courage Campaign available through the same link.

From the Courage Campaign letter:

"On December 19, 2008, Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the marriages of 18,000 devoted same-sex couples solemnized before Prop 8 passed.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on March 5, with a decision expected within 90 days."

Sign the letter now!

Propositon 8 at the Oscars

"MILK" screenwriter Dustin Lance Black won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 81st Annual Academy Awards. "MILK" tells the story of Harvey Milk, California's first openly gay elected official. During his acceptance speech, he promised that one day America's gay and lesbian communities would enjoy "equal rights, federally across this great nation of ours." Black was wearing a White Knot for marriage equality.



Later, Sean Penn thanked the "commie, homo-loving sons of guns" who awarded him the Best Actor Oscar for his work in "MILK." He also promised that those who supported Proposition 8 would one day feel a "great shame" for voting against equal rights for everyone. Anti-gay protestors picked in the streets of Hollywood before and during the Academy Awards ceremonies. Backstage, when asked what he would tell those protesters if he could speak to them, Penn responded: "I'd tell them to turn in their hate card and find their better self."

Matt Taibbi visits Ithaca College

On February 9th, Rolling Stone's politics writer Matt Taibbi spoke to students at Ithaca College during a lecture titled "Independent Journalism Amidst Conformist Media." Taibbi is known for his scathing indictments of the powers that be, their hypocrisy, corruption and deception. He earned the National Magazine Award for commentary in 2008 and contributed to coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign for HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

Early in his lecture, Matt Taibbi dropped a bomb on the student audience, a large percentage of which were journalism majors: True objectivity is impossible in journalism, he said. According to Taibbi, it's not only individual reporters that are biased -- the corporate system is biased too. For example, a paper will be reluctant to run a story that casts a company in a negative light if it's receiving advertising dollars from that company. Taibbi, therefore, likes the Russian style of journalism, where reporters are allowed to voice their social and political beliefs and biases upfront so that readers know from where and from who their news is coming. "People will trust a reporter more if they have some sense of what he's like," he said. American journalism's false pretense of objectivity is one of Taibbi's biggest beefs with corporate mainstream media. He despises the terse, emotionless style of American journalism; the flat, neutral tone reporters are encouraged to use. Concealed within dull American journalism, Taibbi sees the hidden biases and propaganda of publication editors and owners. Taibbi believes journalism would be more open and honest if journalists were allowed to write in "a human, colloquial style."

Taibbi said that while college students are taught the "rules of journalism" in regards to proper writing format, they won't learn about the "politics of journalism" until they enter the workforce. Young journalists working in America soon discover that they are only allowed to fully express themselves at full volume if their editors agree with what they're writing. Compared to Russian journalism, American journalism is both stylistically and ideologically rigid, said Taibbi. Instead of offering an accurate projection of reality, American journalists are subconsciously trained to reflect the ideological character of individual publishing institutions, advertisers or the government in their writing. But Taibbi believes people prefer the "unscrubbed, unsanitized version of reality." Journalists should take a "raw, truthful approach" to reporting.

The best way to be an independent journalist -- independent in the sense that your work doesn't play into the hands of corporate or government interests -- is to make your personal voice evident in your writing, said Taibbi. Good writers are direct, use the clearest imagery at their disposal, and use "one voice -- the writer's own voice." "Good writing and good journalism are not the same thing," lamented Taibbi, who was an English major at Bard College and wanted to write the next great American novel long before he became a journalist. Taibbi's voice comes through in the humor of his writing. He hates that humorous stories only appear in opinion or "news of the weird" sections, or in 30-second fluff clips at the end of evening newscasts. Life isn't compartmentalized, so why should reporting be? The news presents life without sarcasm or irony -- a distorted projection of reality, in Taibbi's opinion. There are several famous examples of how Taibbi has used humor to comment on American journalism and politics: he's smeared a reporter's face with horse-spunk pie, followed John Kerry around in a gorilla suit, and dropped acid and wore a Viking helmet during a campaign interview.

Read Taibbi's Rolling Stone articles and blog. His interview with Scholars and Rogues is also pretty interesting.

Out of print

New Yorker article on the Huffington Post, which may be the model for a new type of newspaper.