Here is more about the conference:

One of the first national gatherings for local, online citizen journalists and entrepreneurs, sometimes called “placebloggers.” Designed for existing and prospective journalists and entrepreneurs. Including workshops on the legal, business, journalistic, marketing, advertising and social aspects of starting and running a local online news and commerce community. Timed and located to coincide with the National Conference on Media Reform.

If you want community foundation funding for local journalism projects, Newton says do your homework. Look at this Knight Foundation site and look specifically at the survey Knight did with community foundations. Then go pay your foundation a visit.

Elizabeth Edwards says it all again, but this time about the present campaign coverage. In The New York Times she writes in part:

The problem today unfortunately is that voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do… 

She asks why Fred Thompson, who was a non-candidate from beginning to end, was anointed as a front runner by the news media even before he declared, while Joe Biden got no coverage even though he was in the race with fine ideas.

Her’s is worth a read and when you are there click on her interview too, it’s a good listen.

What is most amazing to me was that there was not one reported moment. No one interviewing people. No voice of the people. Just the big mouths, yelling at each other. It was to me just a continued extension of the ABC News debate where political trivia, sleaze and manipulation reigned supreme. If TV news disappeared tonight, what difference would it make to our democracy. None.

In my moments of despair over journalism, the profession I love, I keep getting draw back to the Public Journalism Network charter declaration. Twenty-four of  us worked on that in early 2003, but I think we did a very good job of defining what we wanted from journalism. Here are a couple of my favorite declarations, the essense of which have been totally abandoned by commercial TV:

We believe journalism and democracy work best when news, information and ideas flow freely; when news fairly portrays the full range and variety of life and culture of all communities; when public deliberation is encouraged and amplified; and when news helps people function as political actors and not just as political consumers. 

We believe the best journalism helps people see the world as a whole and helps them take responsibility for what they see. 

Did that awful TV commentary tonight help me see the world better and to be a better actor in the democracy in which I live. No. Not at all. It was a waste of my time and instead of helping engage people in the political process, it has done nothing but drive them away.

As I said after the ABC News debate debacle and I will say here to CNN and MSNBC you owe the American people an apology. We deserve better.
 

several dozen … military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized. 

And here is the news dagger:

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. …

…members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

After allowing Pentagon officials to deny the relationship, the Times reporter David Barstow writes:

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Many of these analyists showed up on Fox, but were almost everywhere else too:

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

All of this was a covert operation, unbeknown to the news outlets, indeed:

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

So we have absolutely terrible vetting by the TV and radio news, with military industrial complex shills posing as unbiased analysts, but alas we have a brilliant story by the New York Times exposing how the news media were used to spread pro administration propaganda and they did.

Of course, we the people got a distorted view of the war and in a democracy that is not a very good thing.

If the ABC News Presidential Primary debate debacle had happened back then, people like David Brooks and George Stephanopoulos with their now totally neanderthal view of quality news and information, would have had the megaphone and totally trumped any criticism and put the Public Journalism people on the defensive. The movement had the right ideas, but lacked the DNA to make them heard and happen. In a figurative sense public journalism lacked the equivalent of thumbs. But alas it has the thumbs now.

In 2004 I wrote:

The new weblog-infused DNA makes public journalism more nimble and provides it with figurative set of thumbs. It allows public journalism to grasp and do things impossible in the old public journalism… We want to ensure that the … spin doctors do not control our elections..

I do believe if there are any spin doctors out there today thinking like Brooks did in his New York Times column, they are in big trouble. Brooks wrote:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. 

This week, some 20 years after the first protests about this inane, neanderthal type of journalism, the spin doctors, Stephanopoulos and Brooks have learned that the people have their own megaphones and that the once struggling public journalism has evolved into the public’s journalism and its new thumbs cannot only grasp, but when push comes to shove, they can gouge.

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that…

Here is my favorite part, Brooks writes:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues.

Hey David, you forgot to mention that while H. W. Bush was touring the flag factories during the 1988 election the Republicans were also running the racist Willie Horton ads. In fact, it was exactly the very trivia and sleaze that David Brooks thinks is good journalism that led to the public or civic journalism movement. Here is what Charlotte Grimes wrote in a Harvard public policy paper:

The defining event for civic journalism is usually pinned to the 1988 presidential campaign, with its fixation on horse-race polls and focus on Gary Hart’s adultery, George Bush’s visits to flag factories and Willie Horton ads, and Michael Dukakis’ ride in a tank. The campaign was a triumph of trivia, sleaze and manipulation. And it provoked an outburst of soul-searching by many journalists on their role in it.

Apparently it caused no soul searching for David Brooks — he thinks manipulative questions are good journalism. He can make his elitist, well-mannered argument, but on this one I am siding with  my wife, who during the “symbolic issues” questioning Brooks describes above, was screaming: Haven’t they heard how many people died in Iraq today? Ask a question about that. Haven’t they heard how many people are losing their homes today? Ask about that.

David, maybe you haven’t heard, the American people are tired of the trivia oriented, sleazy and manipulative political maneuvering, which you so politely call “symbolic issues.”

Of course, David Brooks, who has sided with the current administration on so many bad policy decisions, would prefer that the real issues get ignored. So David let me ask you a symbolic issues question: Which is more important an American flag lapel pin or the 4,000 plus flag-draped caskets that have come back to America from the Iraq war which you supported? Apparently in a debate you think the former is more important, my wife thinks the latter and so do I and so do most other Americans.