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What Media Democracy Looks Like: Testifying in Milwaukee

FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein"Media democracy" is a term that everyone defines a little differently.

Is it quality reporting that not only informs about local, national and international issues, but also facilitates citizen involvement? Is it having the diversity of our communities represented among media owners? Is it giving local programmers access to the airwaves? Is it holding broadcasters to the terms of their freely-granted licenses? Is it ensuring a variety of news and cultural media offerings?

Update: Congress vs. the President

A few weeks ago, we first posted on the subject of presidential signing statements. At that time, we issued a challenge to all the citizen journalists out there to help us pin down the positions of the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sen. Arlen Specter's (R-Pa.) Presidential Signing Statements Act, where the bill currently resides. The bill would grant Congress the right to file suit in order to determine the constitutionality of signing statements.

Update: Exposing Earmarks

It has been nearly two weeks since our first post on earmarks, and there are some interesting updates to report. The Sunlight Foundation has continued to employ new and innovative tools in its quest to expose earmarks, which often glide into law without legislative or executive review. Sunlight, which cosponsors Congresspedia with the Center for Media and Democracy, has teamed up with Human Events Online, Citizens Against Government Waste, Porkbusters.org, The Heritage Foundation, The Club for Growth, Townhall.com, and the Washington Examiner (and Mark Tapscott) to sift through the 1,867 earmarks which were inserted into the 2007 Labor-Health and Human Services appropriations bill (H.R. 5647) (an increase from only 51 last year). The collaborative effort has led to the development of a comprehensive database of the earmarks, tracking the money to the designated state and program.

Some Murders are More Equal than Others: The Media's Sick Obsession with JonBenet Ramsay

Juan Cole has an interesting blog post that contrasts the media's obsession with JonBenet Ramsey with its relative silence about the murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, the 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was reportedly raped and murdered, along with her family, by U.S. soldiers. Cole writes,

Both victims were pretty little girls. Both were killed by sick predators. But whereas endless speculation about the Ramsey case, to the exclusion of important real news stories, is thought incumbent in cabalnewsland, Abeer al-Janabi's death is not treated obsessively in the same way. ... CNN even calls the little girl a "woman" at first mention, because the US military indictment did so. Only later in the article is it revealed that she was a little girl. The very pedophiliac nature of the crime is more or less covered up in the case of al-Janabi, even as looped video of Ramsay as too grown up is endlessly inflicted on us.

The message US cable news is sending by this privileging of some such stories over others of a similar nature is that some lives are worth more than others, and some people are "us" whereas other people are "Other" and therefore lesser. Indeed, it is precisely this subtle message sent by American media that authorized so much taking of innocent Iraqi life in the first place.

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