I think I’ve seen one of the top ten stupidest headlines ever created (although I probably should reserve judgment, no doubt humans have not yet reached the zenith of stupidity). It is authored by someone named Charles Murray and in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. The headline that caught my eye:…
A few days ago, I was at the Memphis Convention Center waiting for Dennis Kucinich to enter a large room to begin his press conference. The reporter sitting in front of me noticed that I was wearing credentials bearing the word “press,” credentials granted by the National Conference for Media Reform.
She asked me about “Dangerous Intersection.” I told her that it is a blog created in March 2006. I mentioned that we have a dozen participating authors and that we get about 1100 unique visitors each day.
She asked, “Would you have ever believed back in March that you would be sitting here covering a press conference of a person running for President of the United States?” It didn’t cross my mind back then. This blogging experience has taken lots of unexpected twists and turns. I jokingly told her that she was making me nervous by making the press conference seem more important–and reminding me that I am merely a citizen journalist.
(Here I am in Memphis, Citizen Journalist. The bottom of my badge reads “Press.”)
One of the main points stressed throughout the Media Reform Conference, however, was that journalism is changing rapidly. Corporate media is struggling (often because its corporate owners are muzzling its reporters) and citizen journalists are stepping into the void. Though the citizen journalists range in quality, they do include many highly qualified reporters who are having lots of fun contributing to the public discourse. Prior to this movement, most of these people …
Imagine that you’ve been given a huge box, hundreds of yards on each side, filled with hundreds of millions of parts. Imagine that you been told that it is your job to assemble all of those parts into a single functioning machine.
To your dismay, though, you can’t find any assembly manual. Imagine your frustration! It’s hard enough to assemble much simpler household products without their manuals. Without instructions, then, how can you possibly assemble hundreds of millions of parts into a functional whole?
Just as there are hundreds of millions of parts in this hypothetical machine, there are hundreds of millions of flesh and blood Americans. Together, we constitute a complex adaptive system of an unimaginably huge number of permutations of interactive possibility.
A vigorous media is the instruction manual for our democracy. It tells us how we fit together by telling us important things about each other. A healthy media doesn’t merely tell us information. To accomplish this, it must also listen to the stories that matter to each of us. A healthy media is necessarily interactive.
The decision to have vigorous media is therefore an affirmation that each person has a significant story to tell. A free and vigorous media allows the people to become self-assembling parts of a Democratic whole. When we are well-informed, we know the real-life possibilities for interacting with each other.
To function smoothly and efficiently as a democracy, we often need to work closely together, in a coordinated …
The American public has a friend in Ed Markey, the Massachusetts' representative who is the now the Chairman and the highest-ranking Democrat of the House Subcommittee on Telecomunications and the Internet. Markey knows media well. This video is proof. He knows that the telephone companies have one full-time lobbyist in…
I happened upon this beautifully produced anachronistic commercial, and it started me thinking. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4JSYS7pda8[/youtube] If only the effort that went into producing this product-targeted circus went into promoting newsworthy events.