In an era when traditional journalism is collapsing and all limits on campaign spending have been removed by the courts, spin is becoming more powerful and permanent than ever before.
Two teenage girls were arrested and detained this week for Tweeting threats to a rape victim. It appears that the young people of Steubenville have not learned much about the uses of social media even after the extraordinary trials and convictions of two young men for rape this week in a case that relied heavily upon the photos, videos, and Tweets taken concomitantly with the crime.
Last week, the Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation magazine worked together to publish a package in The Nation and a new online wiki resource on Pete Peterson and the Campaign to Fix the Debt, an entity we consider an "astroturf supergroup" with a huge budget working hard to create the fantasy that Americans care more about national debt and deficits than jobs and the economy. Fix the Debt is currently exploiting the "sequester" debate in Congress to encourage steep cuts to incredibly popular social programs like Medicare and Social Security.
by Dylan Brogan
At the height of the collective bargaining protests, when nearly all the doors at the Capitol were locked and guarded by police officers from every corner of the state, Dick Wheeler -- the unquestioned leader of the Wisconsin Capitol press corps -- ensured that members of the media were not denied access to the building.
You helped make the world a better place this year. You helped expose corruption and thwart efforts to distort our democracy.
1. You helped force 42 major corporations and 70 legislators to do something they did not want to do, leave the American Legislative Exchange Council.
--by Peter Hart, originally published in FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting)
In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left, Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.
The Washington Post's Bob Woodward obtained an audio recording of a conversation between David Petraeus, the general turned CIA Director who recently resigned in the midst of a sex scandal, and Fox News contributor Kathleen T. McFarland. The conversation took place in spring 2011 in Kabul, during the time that Petraeus was the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. McFarland is a national security analyst for Fox News and has a long resume working for GOP administrations going back to Reagan.
Fox News was publicly skewered and filleted this week by one of their own guests, Thomas E. Ricks, an expert on military and defense policy and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. His interview was abruptly and unceremoniously ended after he calmly tagged Fox as "a wing of the Republican Party."
As a news hound and a mom, I have an early morning routine for catching up on developments while getting the kid ready for school. I head downstairs, snap on the radio, start making coffee, and packing a kid-friendly lunch. The kitchen radio is permanently tuned to 1670 AM WTDY's "Sly in the Morning" show because I know that Sly has been up since 4 a.m. reading half a dozen state and national newspapers, scanning the front pages and the classifieds for the critical, the controversial, the funny, and the obscure.
The Lucy Burns Institute (LBI) is a Madison-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 2006 and named after a significant leader of the women's suffrage movement. The organization sponsors three websites: Ballotpedia, which tracks elections and ballot measures at the state level; WikiFOIA, which provides Information on how to use Freedom of information laws at the state and local level; and Judgepedia, which provides information on the nation's judges and court systems.
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