June 2007 Archives
I would like to propose that Congress reinstate the Fairness Doctrine within the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine is something that I've heard of now and then, but I didn't realize that it was repealed under the Reagan Administration in 1987. It's one of those things I learn as an NPR-listening commuter.
I had heard now and again about the "equal time rule" or that news coverage needed to be "fair and balanced" and that is what the Fairness Doctrine was supposed to guarantee. Yet the Fairness Doctrine is a thing of the past. It was abandoned with the proliferation of cable, leaving broadcasters little incentive to present fair coverage.
When Sinclair Broadcasting removed its offensive documentary during the 2004 election cycle, it wasn't because of the Fairness Doctrine, which no longer existed, but because its stock was tanking due to public outcry.
What was the Fairness Doctrine? Why was it repealed? Should it be reinstated? If so, why?
What was it?
The Fairness Doctrine was a regulation of the United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which required broadcast licensees to present controversial issues of public importance, and to present such issues in what was deemed an honest, equal and balanced manner.It was established to acknowledge the fact that there are more people with opinions than there are broadcast licenses, and public access needs to be fair and balanced.
The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to devote some airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. How this was to be done was at the discretion of the station. This FCC rule held forth from 1949 until 1987.
Citizen groups used the Fairness Doctrine to expand speech and debate by allowing input from both sides for ballot measures and it had the support of grassroots groups across the political spectrum. If one view received a lot of coverage in prime-time, response time would be allowed. It was up to listeners to notice imbalance but its existence encouraged their participation, as they had some recourse. Without the Fairness Doctrine, there is less of an organized route to get action when an issue is presented primarily by one side.
According to a report by the Center for American Progress entitled The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio, 91% of political talk radio was conservative last year. There was ten times as much conservative as progressive talk. 76% of news/talk radio in the Top Ten markets was conservative, while 24% was progressive.
Years before the onset of the Fairness Doctrine, some realized the need for fair and balanced coverage.
Arianna Huffington recently appeared as a featured speaker at the Chautauqua Institution, a truly amazing piece of enlightened American history located in western New York that for well over a century has been a highly influential artistic, cultural, civic, and educational resource for people from all walks of life -- so much so that the name of the original venue became a definitive term for an entire national movement. Erica Erwin of The Erie Times-News had this to say about Ms. Huffington's remarks at the original Chautauqua this week:
CHAUTAUQUA, N.Y. -- In the 1950s, Edward R. Murrow revolutionized the news.
Today, bloggers are changing the way we read and receive the news -- but that doesn't mean traditional media outlets like television or newspapers are dying.
Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor of HuffingtonPost.com, one of the most linked-to and cited blogs on the Internet, delivered that message to the nearly 3,000 people who gathered to hear her speak at the Chautauqua Institution on Wednesday.
"The whole debate over print or Web, print or TV, it's really obsolete," Huffington said. "It's going to be a hybrid future."
Huffington's 30-minute speech, "Edward R. Murrow Would Be a Blogger: How the Internet Revolution is Changing News, Politics, and the Way We See the World," was part of the institution's weeklong examination of the news.
I also covered the second day of Seattle Pride events. The city seems to have grown into the idea of the parade coming out of the "gay ghetto," which is Capital Hill, and into the public venue. There are some, though -- and I do mean some, not all -- who still seem to have a big problem with it.
This is not a matter of Christians vs gays, not at all. It's something else and I wish I knew why they are so preoccupied with other peoples' lives that they would spend their weekends doing this. Maybe they don't like the beer gardens. Maybe it's the drag queens. Maybe it's the school board or the Christian churches that support the gay community. Maybe it's the idea that there is a gay community.
One woman asked them, "Why are you here?" and they couldn't answer. This is the one weekend of the year for celebration of LGBT Pride. What is their problem? They seem to spend an awful lot of time being obsessed about it.
As you can see from the pics, not everyone agreed with those who showed up at the parade just to express their opposition. Some didn't take much notice of it at all. Others were focused on entirely different priorities than the people who were there to protest.
The two lesbians on the bus in front of me were in a hurry to get home and finish making pickles. Maybe those particular people just don't like pickles.
It's a mystery to me.
(The quote in the above window sticker is by Donald Rumsfeld. The photos in this blog entry are by DiAnne Grieser.)
"Free Speech is Not a Crime" is what I saw painted on a wall this morning. I circled the block, parked in a bus zone and hurriedly snapped a photo. With my mental set thus primed, I saw examples of the exercise of free speech all around. I saw it in the manner in which people were dressed, I heard it in the music and the words that they chose, and I even read it on the bathroom wall.
I do not necessarily agree with all of the sentiments as expressed, but I will strongly defend the right of individuals to express themselves. Free speech does not have to be a newspaper or television program by a major media conglomerate. In fact, free speech nowadays is more likely to come from the words, pen, or other expressive media of an individual, unfettered by obligation to represent a corporate CEO or power-hungry politician.
Blogs, YouTube, street theater, flyers -- we need to use all available media to insure that we can continue to exercise our freedom of expression as guaranteed to us in the Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
-- First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
You know, I try not to let these DCP threaders get too personal. I've said before that this is your blog, not mine, and I sincerely mean that. But tonight I'm going to interrupt the normal flow of DCP discourse for something that is rather personal for me. I hope that's okay with you. I'll try to connect it to a broader and even a more politically-connected context by the time we're done here, really I will. But for right now those aren't the terms I'm thinking of. So please bear with me while I break my own rules and let things get personal for me here tonight, too.
I've done a whole lot of things over the years, you know. It's been a pretty complicated and pretty darn interesting life. Or lives, rather; I often refer back to something that happened in "one of my previous lives," because at times they seem so odd and unconnected even to me, in the glare of 20/20 hindsight and all. But what's making me post this threader tonight is closely connected to one of my previous lives, and at the risk of misusing this bully pulpit I'm temporarily occupying, I need to write about this stuff or I will never get to sleep tonight for all the thoughts and memories and wishes colliding around inside my head.
As some of you know, I lived in Atlanta for the last two decades or so of the 20th century. Most of you don't know that I spent a significant chunk of those two decades on call waiting for bad stuff to happen while hoping like hell that it never did. I haven't shucked on a set of turnouts and stepped into fire boots since, oh, I think maybe 1988 or so. It's certainly been a lot of years since the last time I stood up and accepted my certification docs from the Georgia Fire Academy.
But, yeah, anyway, been there and done that. And even when you don't do that no more, some of it stays with you no matter what. So no matter how many years have gone by and no matter how thin the link may get stretched by time, even after all this time and all this space those who are bold enough and brave enough to do what has to be done in the face of the evil dragon that is Fire are still, at some level, my brothers in arms.
And when they fall I mourn them, every one. Tonight, though, I mourn nine of them in particular:
While karen's down in Mobile dancing for peace where the ragman draws circles up and down the block, Americans everywhere are shouting out their windows that they're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. William Rivers Pitt recently summed up both the dammed-up hope and the the pent-up rage that Americans are feeling so brilliantly in this Truthout essay that we felt it worth reposting at length as today's thread header here. Pitt's use of his friend Dan's small but serious gesture as a metaphor for what needs to be done and his description of the single thing that still unites our intensely fragmented American society are examples of political writing at its best, as is his echoing of a powerful quote by another one of America's great activists, Frederick Douglass:
"When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind."
A Time to Reap
by William Rivers PittMy friend Dan was on his way home the other day, and found an American flag crumpled in a gutter outside his apartment building. The flag, perhaps as big as the cover of a book, had been used as a decoration for some pre-Fourth of July party, but afterwards was merely thrown aside like litter for the street-sweepers to collect.
Dan gathered it up, smoothed the creases, and hung it from a nearby railing. The motivation for his actions was hard for him to explain, but it came down to this: Everything else in America is so screwed up, but this American thing before him would not be defiled within reach of his arm. My friend, surrounded by the chaos of a flailing nation and filled with the need to act, found some solace in the rescue of that flag.
He is not alone in his sentiments, not alone in his desire to make things right again within reach of his arm.
There is something happening today in America. With the right kind of ears, you can hear it in the sound of millions of brows slowly furrowing in anger and disgust. It feels like those tense moments just before the eruption of a summer thunderstorm, those moments when the air is electric, the ozone reek of spent lightning fills the world, and you know something very loud is about to happen.
Mobile is a sultry place, friendly but languid spot along the Gulf, with antebellum houses and great shrimp. I'm here for a dance conference, but President Bush is stopping off here today, and so we just had to come on down to share some feelings with him.
So what we have here at the moment is a bunch of modern dancers and some Vets for Peace, with attitudes.
Bush is here for a fundraiser for Jeff Sessions. It's $1000 a plate. So the local guys have a message to kick things off:
More local color to come...
[Ed's note: some comments, such as this one from the previous thread, just plain deserve to get promoted to blog threaders as well. And this is a Good Thing.]
Do you know that I am up 1-1/2 hour early because I could not sleep? In a way it was the cats, the crows, the Canadian geese, the cop cars and the cold, in exactly that order. It was also the thoughts running endlessly through my brain:
What if Gore had held out longer?
What if we had signed Kyoto?
What if we had anticipated and stopped 9/11? (Having just read a long article about George Tenet of the CIA last night in the New Yorker, I believe we could and should have been able to do this)
What if we hadn't gone into Iraq? Would the domes of the mosques still be standing? Would we have a trillion dollars to spend on alternative energies? Would we have really needed Homeland Security?
What if we had never gotten involved in the internal politics of Iran and Iraq back in the day?
What if we had never armed Iran or Iraq, either one?
What if we had left well enough alone?
What if we had bolstered the levies of New Orleans?
What if we had gone ahead with tsunami detection including in the Indonesia region - helped more with this?
What if we had helped more with actual impending humanitarian disasters like East Timor, Rwanda, Darfur?
What if we had put more into eradicating AIDS rather than promoting abstinence?
What if we promoted abstract reasoning in our young people?
What if we concentrated on meth labs instead of medical marijuana?
What if we joined the rest of the developed world and made it so that people here could have health care?
What if we tried to decrease our prison population?
What if people who worry about when life starts worried as much about preventing things like that creepo in England who was molesting children live on the internet, to requests or pregnant women from getting blown up in war?
I had to get up because I was making myself crazy and obviously couldn't sleep. The crows are making the exact pissed off sound that I would make if my vocal tract would allow it.
Posted by: not my president at June 20, 2007 08:13 AM
Last week karen presented us with a video she'd made in memory of liberal media activist Maria Leavey, in which she cited a number of other women who had the courage to speak out against war and injustice. As she noted in her intro to that video,
...in reading about Maria, I recognized aspects of so many of the women (and some men) who work day after day to make a difference, including the lack of resources and reduced circumstances under which they toil. So I made a video. It's called 'What Would Maria Do?' I made it because I want you to know about the women who create, write, speak, march, and who make a difference, no matter how small, and who inspire me to keep on keeping on.
I was reminded of that video when I read a recent dKos diary profiling another woman activist who's displaying uncommon courage, strength, and tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds. Her name is Doris Tennant, but she and her equally courageous partner Ellen Lubell are not marching in the street for the sake of justice -- they're carrying it with them right through the cold gray gates of Guantanamo Bay.
Here's what dKos diarist geomoo had to say about the two women's efforts to defend Gitmo detainees against their illegal detention:
My ex-wife, Doris Tennant-Moore, just returned from her second visit to Guantanamo, where she is representing Abdul Aziz Naji. To all appearances, he is one of the unluckiest of the unlucky, in contrast to his characterization by our government. It seems he was arbitrarily captured on the basis either of association with the wrong people or of being turned in for bounty. He claims never to have committed any kind of violence against any US citizen. I am writing this diary to inform, but also in hopes of attracting some emotional and financial support for Doris’ principled commitment to do all she can to represent one detainee and to fight our country's illegal and immoral conduct at Guantanamo.
Finally, the sun has come and I went in search of some good political street theater and found it in Seattle's magical Fremont neighborhood. We celebrate the summer solstice in mythic style with a parade, pageant and sustainability festival. It's a yearly celebration of the arts, lasting community and positive futures. It's about co-creating a celebration that inspires us all to live well and joyfully, while living more lightly on our planet earth. We show up in the thousands.
Festivities include the beloved bike riders in body paint, extravagant costumes and floats as well as samba bands, giant puppets and impersonators of political figures we all know. "The Sun Arc" is a staged modern myth combining the ancient theme of the sun's rebirth with a modern sustainability twist. There is a recycled clothing "Swap-a-rama" and information on natural gardening and reducing global warming. The soundtrack ranges from country to folk to Cajun to hip hop to folk to world music and more. Then the art cars roll in. Many of you will recognize the folks from the Backbone Campaign (wearing the paper mache heads).
Over the next two days, we can make our own fashion statement from recycled clothing, learn the art of bee keeping, learn from master gardeners, make and play with toy boats, calculate our carbon footprints, participate in performances, sign the US Constitution, make a puppet, and help create a zero waste event by recycling and composting everything we use this weekend.
Here is a partial list of celebrants:
Clownland Security, Worker Bees, Chalk Fairies, Solstice Cyclists, Bilion Belly March, Trash People, Bugs and Beasts, 2nd Wind Drumline, The Lunicycles, Boxeus, YaYas for TaTas, Pure Cirkus, Hot Boyz and Solar Sisters, Wicked Jesters, Rainbow City Band, Chain Gang and Lady Liberty, Hare Krishna Marching Troop, Flock of Birds, Foam Free Seattle, Disco in the Streets, Super Huggers, Puff the Freedom Dragon, Rubber Duckies, SLUGS - Sun Lovers under Gray Skies, Rain Barrel Robots, Wood Troll.
Once again, it's nice to see some action at the intersection of life, art and politics. I have only included the most political photos. Several local blogs (including mine) will feature many many others.
(photo courtesy New York Times)
To someone my age, Mr. Wizard was synonymous with science. For those too young to remember Mr. Wizard, he was Don Herbert -- TV's favorite science teacher who taught kids (and plenty of adults) to try everything at home. His show ran from 1951 to 1964.
I watched him on tv and tried again and again to duplicate his feats, such as putting a silk scarf into a glass of colored water and pulling it out dry. I went to elementary school at a time when there was great excitement about science and when President Kennedy's administration was able to supply federal funds for enhanced science education even to our little town in rural South Dakota. We had Space Science, Advanced Biology and Sex Education. So I found the timing of the death of Mr. Wizard particularly poignant in this time when the very life of our planet is at stake and when our Administration could be so much more pro-science.
My friend Chris is a hardware/software engineer who reads Scientific American cover-to-cover for pleasure and his father was a science teacher. I emailed him about Mr. Wizard as soon as I heard that he had passed on. Chris wrote:
"I learned a lot from Mr. Wizard, and my dad always loved watching it with me (or, actually, me watching it with him) and he often explained more details about the science with me and taught me a lot. I remember an episode where Mr. Wizard showed 4 ways to cook a hot dog: over fire; in boiling water; electrical wires plugged into a hot dog to be 'electrocuted'; and then he wrapped a hot dog in a napkin, put a toothpick through it, put it on a paper plate then then put it in a 'Microwave Oven' for 30 seconds and it came out steaming, but the paper hadn't burned!! My dad knew about this technology but I could hardly believe it and never thought it would become commonplace (I always remembered this when microwave ovens first became available)..."
I collected for Chris some favorite quotes about science, which I believe is one of our hopes for the future, if we use it (like any tool) wisely:
Women who have raised children understand a lot about how to motivate them to do the right thing, as opposed to the easy thing, or the self-serving thing. Allow me, as a mom, to share some insight into that process:
Johnny, age 8, tells Mom he can’t possibly clean up the mess he has made, because if he stopped now to clean up, he would not finish his game and then his friend Freddy would be disappointed. Besides, he tells me, he is winning, or will be soon…
Mom's response: “You have ten seconds to begin cleaning up. 9, 8, 7….”
Sally, age 14, tells Mom she does not have NEARLY enough clothes for summer and she needs a credit card to go to the Mall. Besides, her friends all have credit cards and THEIR parents let them charge as much as they want…
Mom's response: “And you will be getting a job in which store?”
The United States government, age (almost) 211, tells all the Moms that their sons and daughters are needed to fight a war, that the kids will be fighting for freedom and to protect our vulnerable borders, and besides, they will take good care of them upon their safe return from battle…
Mom's response: “WHAT noble cause???”
...because what the hell comment could one possibly add to this, anyway?
There's been an epidemic of mental failure in Congressional hearings lately. But unless you're addicted to watching C-SPAN (and you know who you are), you may have missed seeing the initial symptoms of the outbreak.
But with the internet and easy-to-use video editing tools available, user-generated content has stepped up to fill the gap between long & boring and short & entertaining.
Those suffering from the affliction have appeared in a number of Congressional hearings and can be identified by their heavy repetition of the phrases, "I don't remember" and "I don't recall".
Of the more recent outbreak, Kyle Sampson was the first notable case.
Then Kyle's boss caught it.
This is not exactly breaking news in the blogosphere by now -- the word went out early last Saturday, and dwahzon mentioned it in passing earlier in the previous thread -- but the DCP gets a lot of readers that don't always follow the other progressive blogs. So I thought I'd go ahead and make sure this community was aware of it, too.
That, and also because I already miss a guy who was a huge influence on the progressive blogosphere and who, though I never had the chance to tell him so, had an influence on my own writing and my own involvement in said progressive blogosphere.
His name was Steve Gilliard, and he was an amazing guy and a force to be reckoned with. And he died this past weekend after a hard-fought struggle for life against nearly impossible odds. He was 41 years old. He had an amazing zest for life, an outstandingly sharp mind, and a heart as big as the sky.
It was that heart that finally gave out on him, but only in a physical sense -- he had more life and more spirit in him than most of us can ever lay claim to, and that spirit still lives on in the hearts and minds of many, many people whose lives he touched through his words and his presence.
I'm not going to write a eulogy for Steve here. Many people who knew him far better than me and who are far better writers than I am have already done that over the course of these last sad days. You can see that for yourself just by checking out this Google blog search link.
I will post a few links to some of the many blog posts in memory of Steve that I think give a particularly good sense of who he was. After that, I'm going to post just one of his many outstanding pieces of online writing, one he wrote for his blog in December of 2003 -- and one that is still all the more powerful for us to read here in the spring of 2007 for what it says about the things we believe in here at the DCP.
I encourage you all to follow up on these and the other related links to find out more about the man and all the things he had to say, especially the rich flow of comments and links in the Daily Kos threads that noted his passing over the weekend. No, wait, strike that -- I'm not going to encourage you to spend some quality time getting to know the amazing cornerstone of progressive blogwriting that was the late Steve Gilliard.
I'm going to humbly ask you to do so instead. Please. His words and his spirit live on, and if you haven't gotten to read his writings yet, then it's still not too late to do so. You -- and the rest of the world we live in -- will be much the better for it if you get to know Steve Gilliard, the iconic progressive blogger, and take his words to heart. Trust me on that.
Requiscat en pace, Steve. You left some mighty big shoes for the rest of us to fill. We'll do our best to fill them, I promise.
I spent last weekend with my family -- or rather, many variations thereof. We began with Larry's prom (he was stunning), and continued into Saturday with a nice drive to Columbus, Ohio, Larry's inert body in the back seat.
Columbus Ohio was playing host to Cirque du Soleil's production of 'Corteo', the story of a clown looking back over his life -- er, loosely speaking, anyway. To the extent that 'Corteo' has a plot and a story, my cousin Jeff was starring in it this time, playing the clown. But as with any Cirque production, it's all really a frame on which to hang some amazing performances of athleticism and transformation.
Watching the performers, who come from all over the world and speak many languages (English not so much!), was a revelation. I saw the circus artists throwing each other around even as they kept a careful eye on the safety of the others. I saw amazing feats of skill as they threw themselves free of platforms and poles, trusting the speed and the space to support the movement, knowing that they would land just right, after flight. And I saw the transcendent whimsical universal act of engaging in the superhuman, with sheer joy and skill. "damn everything but the circus", ee cummings wrote. And I agreed.
So often I long for a return to a world of technique and refinement of the art of communication and contact. With every fiber of my body, I would like to dance free again. But, at least in current times, it seems that we Americans have chosen horror over joy, profits over community, and violence over love.
Not these Cirque clowns, however. My cousin Jeff told us afterwards that, as highly trained as they are, and as challenged in English as they are, they come to him day after day, begging him to teach them to become a clown. "Make me a clown", they say. They do not mean, "make me a fool." They mean: "Make me a clown who can fall and cry and show us the way to our human hearts".
Today's threader was guest-written by our Australian friend Wendy Lohse, aka woz.
Frequently, I'm reminded of the huge range of people I come across on the DCP blog. I love the mix. I love the snippets from home that slide into posts every now and then. I love the range of personalities. And I love the examples of your energetic activism.
Events like the demonstrations that DiAnne reports on for the DCP provide creative inspiration to us here as well as to yourselves. Karen's continued perseverance and the actions of the Code Pink women also show that even small actions can provide the spark that will grow into a flame. Code Pink didn't begin big -- it has grown big. Code Pink is now a force to be reckoned with.
But while reading the blog this morning, I was jolted into reality when I came across this line from Indie Liberal:
"I bet Rove is just laughing his tail off at the way we continue to eat our own."
I say "jolted", because that's how it hit me. Smack! Right in the gut! We are heading for a continued catastrophe unless we are able to harness the criticisms of our own and turn them into positive, published, public awareness. While we "eat our own" we allow fear to escalate and translate into war. As yet we have no idea what the consequences will be.
We know the consequences of the Vietnam war. The consequences live in broken bodies and minds amongst us. They live in the deformed and damaged bodies and brains of Vietnam's population. What do we call American defoliants that rained down on our own soldiers and allies in Vietnam? Friendly fire? Defoliants that cause sickness and deformity through who knows how many generations? Friendly? Fire?
From across the world we look to America to never again let the United States' mainstream media take away from us the things we most value. Peace. Truth. Justice. Freedom.
Through this media the lies, trickery and criminal activity run rampant, unencumbered by facts. Fear sells. War sells. Peace is placid. It's time to engage Americans in a media investigation. I know that I see some horrifying things that are done in your name, but without your knowledge. I remember watching a documentary about 20 years ago, made by American journalists, about one of the South American nightmares. This documentary was banned in the US at the time. I have no link because I don't remember the country or the concerns raised. I remember it BECAUSE it was banned in the US.
I understand the problem of your mainstream media being used to manipulate people's thoughts and beliefs. It's the same here. I forget that because I never watch or read it. A friend asked me, "How do you know all that?" And then I realized why people vote, the way they vote. It's because of the information that seeps silently into their psyche. What can we do to protect ourselves against that?
People will never know how they really feel until we start using the mainstream media in the way the tricksters use it. Meet propaganda and lies head on. It takes money and that's the most unfortunate thing. But some people are getting the message out. Michael Moore has done a lot. Al Gore has done a lot. John and Teresa Kerry have tentacles reaching out into all kinds of multi-faceted spheres. And information is getting through. But we still need more. We need it everywhere. Otherwise the politicians who use fear as a weapon and lies as excuses will still have the upper hand.
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