citizen journalism

Netroots Nation, the annual conference for thousands of liberal bloggers, Democratic Party activists and liberal advocacy organizations is underway today, July 17, and through the weekend in Austin, Texas. In the decade since then-First Lady Hillary Clinton railed against the "vast Right Wing conspiracy," Democratic liberals have woven their own with dozens of new think tanks, lobby groups, funders like the Democracy Alliance and George Soros, scores of consultants and hundreds of millions of dollars raised and spent to grease the wheels of collaboration, all designed this year to win the White House and solidify control of the Congress.

Liberal bloggers are notorious dissenters and critics of mainstream Democratic policies, but there won't be much of that on formal display in Austin, nothing like the "Coffee with the Troops" which injected an unscheduled discussion of the Iraq War into last year's conference in Chicago. Potentially controversial issues including Dennis Kucinich's call for impeachment of President Bush, or the failure of the Democratic Congress to stop funding the war in Iraq, are off the official agenda at Netroots Nation.

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at the spin around same-sex marriage, Christine Todd Whitman's job pitch and how Wikipedia threatens the PR industry. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," how are same-sex marriage opponents linked to Iraq war proponents? The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!

The largest PR and communications firm in France is asserting that "Wikipedia cannibalizes the image" of the biggest French corporations and their CEOs. Euro RSCG's complaint is that Wikipedia articles score exceptionally high in search engine rankings -- often ahead of the corporations' own websites. A recent study of the top 40 French corporations found that, for 39 companies, the Wikipedia article appeared on the first page of Internet search results. Euro RSCG disputes the veracity of the Wikipedia articles and claims that they "contribute to the enterprises' image and can harm the value of their brand." Pierre Beaudouin, President of Wikimedia France, responded that "PR firms forget that a Wikipedia article is not intended to assure promotion of a company." He added that corporations could help ensure accuracy by pointing out good sources of information, but he said that companies usually just want to have their press releases included verbatim.

On Saturday the Democratic National Committee Rules and Bylaws Committee will meet to decide the fate of Florida and Michigan's delegates to the Democratic National Convention. As DNC members, the 30 rules committee members are all superdelegates and also have a vote at the convention. Between them, 13 have endorsed Hillary Clinton, eight have endorsed Barack Obama and nine are uncommitted. They also include one DNC member from Michigan (uncommitted) and one from Florida (endorsing Hillary), who are unable to cast a vote concerning their home states. (See the full membership here.)

The committee will hear challenges to its earlier ruling that Michigan and Florida's delegates would not be seated at the national convention, with their votes thus not counting towards the presidential nomination. Bringing the challenges are Florida superdelegate and DNC member Jon Ausman (undeclared for either Clinton or Obama) and a representative from Michigan's state democratic party. Other representatives from the two state parties and the presidential campaigns will also make their case to the committee.

The committee will hear three specific challenges:

On March 27, a coalition of Democratic House candidates and military experts unveiled the "Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq." As one of the more solid commitments to end the war, it has generated a lot of buzz lately as more than 50 candidates have endorsed it. With the Iraq War as the foremost issue this season, an endorsement of the plan is a critical piece of information about a U.S. congressional candidate, so we need your help to add it to the profiles of candidates that make up Congresspedia's Wiki-the-Vote project. (If they haven't endorsed the plan, you can call attention to that as well.) No experience is necessary and full instructions for helping out can be found here. It's your democracy - participate!

The post-Abramoff lobbying disclosure reforms have started -- and so far, they're underwhelming. "Confusing shortcuts are already being mapped and loopholes mined," reports Jeanne Cummings. "Among the information that is supposed to be available to the public now is a listing of the financial backers of the shadowy coalitions with apple-pie-sounding names," like Americans for American Energy, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and Americans for Prosperity. But most weren't listed in either the House or Senate disclosure database, and the few that were didn't "list the paying members of their coalition." Part of the problem is that Congress "exempted the financing of grass-roots lobbying from the law. That created a giant loophole for all advocacy organizations to exploit." In fact, Cummings found more on these groups, "culled from media reports, websites, press releases and Internal Revenue Service documents," on CMD's very own SourceWatch site.

An April 7, 2008 citizen journalism task asked people to investigate tobacco industry brainstorming documents at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. That request led to a marvelous blog titled "The Sick and Crazy Science Tobacco Companies Pursue to Get You Hooked," posted on Alternet by Scott Thill, in which he describes some of his finds, including a bizarre research project to investigate the effect of a chemical in cigarette smoke called nitric oxide on cat penises. From nacho cheese-flavored cigarettes to on-pack contests to win everything from Clearasil to used celebrity underwear, tobacco industry brainstorming documents contain an untold number of bizarre marketing, advertising and product design ideas. Thill's blog praises TobaccoWiki's Brainstorming documents page, as well as citizen journalism and the new ways that research wikis are allowing people to compile and share information.

As part of their campaign to demand a Congressional investigation of the Pentagon pundit scandal, FreePress has produced several YouTube videos providing analysis and coverage of the scandal that the TV networks themselves have largely ignored -- not surprisingly, since the scandal documents the networks' unethical journalistic practices. For years now, people have been talking about the potential of citizen journalism to challenge the power of the broadcast media behemoths. This scandal is the perfect opportunity to see how far we've come in achieving that goal. Let's make sure the TV networks don't get away with burying this story. Email the video link to your friends, and make sure they sign the petition!

Often readers and citizen journalists will come across a name of a group that seems a little at odds with the policy message they are promoting. Some of these names were added to the SourceWatch page on front groups with the intention of returning to create an article on that at a later date. Others were emailed to us by citizens, journalists or activists wanting to know if we knew anything about them. So if you would like to help investigate some of the groups that have been flagged as warranting further investigation, here's your chance. All the names are here on this page with some basic tips on how to investigate a group and create a SourceWatch page on them. If you like, you can also add names to the list. If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information to the site here, here and here. Hold onto your hat, have fun, and thanks for your help!

Left-wing U.S. bloggers, including Daily Kos editor David Waldman and former Moveon.org lobbyist Tom Matzzie, who now heads the Campaign to Defend America, will spend six days in Israel as the guests of the Israeli government. The trip is sponsored and organized by the Solomon Project. The bloggers will "meet with Israeli bloggers, journalists and Knesset officials," reports Yitzhak Benhorin. "The Foreign Affairs Ministry has long since been exerting considerable efforts to bring the prominent writers for an extensive tour of the country, in recognizing the influence many of the writers wield and the fact some of them represent websites that are less-than-friendly towards the (sic) Israel." The bloggers will receive briefings on Israel's perception of the security situation and will tour the area between Gaza and the West Bank, known as Israel's "narrow waistline," to illustrate the "true meaning of a return to the borders of June 4th 1967." These borders are spelled out in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967, and were the basis of the Oslo process. The bloggers may also meet Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni.