Citizen Abbott

Publisher of the earth-shaking Chicago Defender, Robert S. Abbott.

Margaret Sanger, flawed hero

Sanger's first publication was called

Woman Rebel. Her later, less "red and flaming" publication was called Birth Control Review, shown here and here. She is proof that heroes, including heroes of indy media, are often flawed. This article from Women's E-News discusses her flirtation with eugenics-oriented arguments in support of birth control in the early 1920s.

Dinner with Amy

In the early 1900s, the socialist Appeal to Reason newspaper offered yachts, fruit farms and motorcycles as premiums to bring in subscriptions and revenue. Democracy Now! offers "Dinner and a Show with Amy Goodman."  

Where are today's Upton Sinclairs?

Colbert accepted the challenge of experiencing difficult working conditions as a farm worker. Here he is doing farm labor (in upstate New York).

Or is it Barbara Ehrenreich, who worked at low wage jobs (waitress, maid, Wal-Mart employee) for her book Nickel and Dimed to see if she could make ends meet?

Students continue Ida B. Wells legacy

Over the last 15 years, Northwestern University students (in journalism and law) and their professors  were instrumental in proving the innocence of many prisoners in Illinois, several of whom had been sentenced to death. Their investigative journalism was controversial and far from perfect, but it ultimately sparked the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois in 2011.

Lynching prompted the classic Billie Holiday song,"Strange Fruit," which she recorded independently in 1939 -- getting around the objections of Columbia, her record company: "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." It ultimately became her biggest selling record. Time magazine denounced the song as a "piece of musical propaganda." The song's lyrics were inspired by this photograph of a 1930 lynching in Indiana.

Re Legacy: I'm not aware of any schools named after newspaper editors because they ignored or apologized for racist lynchings. But Ida B. Wells has a high school named after her (school home page here) in San Francisco (just across the park from the famous "painted ladies" Victorian houses.)

"Journalism," Fox News-style

Is this serious journalism?

Journalists have to re-fight old battles

Dissident publications throughout history exposed many social wrongs (like the labor weeklies in the 1830s spotlighting the problem of people being jailed simply for being in debt). Exposure led to reform -- debtors' prisons were abolished. But years or generations later, other journalists may have to return to the issue . . . as these investigative journalists for the big mainstream daily in Minneapolis did in 2011.

"It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found."

The Nation returned to the topic of debtors' prisons in 2014, and Izzy Award-winner John Carlos Frey reported on the same theme for public TV in 2015.

 I.F. Stone pointed out that some reforms don't happen except through the work of generations of journalists and democracy activists: 

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing - for the sheer fun and joy of it - to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.”

Early dissident newspapers NOT reader-friendly

See crowded layout of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist publication, The Liberator, here. Not exactly HuffingtonPost. No half-naked actors. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's/Susan B. Anthony's feminist publication, The Revolution, was almost as dense. Content was queen back then. Mainstream press weren't very reader-friendly either in that era.

Student profiles covered. . .

. . . Truthdig.com . . . Bob Scheer, cofounder of Truthdig . . . Democracy Now! . . . Edge of Sports / Dave Zirin . . . The Ringer / Bill Simmons . . . Rookie Mag . . . Orion Magazine (not the constellation) . . . Global Voices Online . . . Pointe Magazine . . . The Young Turks and Cenk Uygur . . . Upworthy.com and a video circulated by Upworthy of Malcolm X . . . Clutch and a video about mass incarceration. . . . SourceWatch and Center for Media and Democracy director Lisa Graves . . .  The Baffler . . . The Nation . . . Bitch Media

Internet Hoaxes

Question: Are younger educated people who were raised on the Internet LESS likely to be taken in by hoax emails such as Obama as "radical Muslim" than Jon Stewart's 80-year-old aunt? Or the hoax about clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger as racist?

Lately, viral video hoaxes seem more common than text hoaxes -- like "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" hoax in 2012, which, unknown to ABC, was perpetrated by film/animation students using computer imaging in Montreal. And like "Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catches Fire," which was a 2013 hoax perpetrated by the Jimmy Kimmel show as self-promotion. (NBC "Today" show interviewed me in 2013 about separating fact from fiction in media and Internet.)

Hot-selling book, thanks to bloggers/Internet buzz

An OhMyNews TV correspondent . . .

. . . tries to get answers in Dec 2013 from a former South Korean president who appointed a discredited director of the National Intelligence Service. Spy chief Won Sei-hoon faced legal charges that he'd meddled in the 2012 presidential election on behalf of the winning conservative candidate through a covert Internet effort to smear opposition candidates. The reporter asked the former president: Do you feel responsible as a person who appointed Won to this post? Soon after this TV report, the spy chief was convicted of graft. 

Nightmare in Tunisia . . . for longtime dictator

Tunisia is a small, Mediterranean country in North Africa.  Back in 2007, Tunisian citizen-journalists had documented the tourism/shopping sprees of the dictator's wife aboard the presidential plane to Europe and global shopping/fashion capitals. (H/t Global Voices)

In 2010, the TuniLeaks website was set up to post (WikiLeaks-released) internal U.S. Embassy documents candidly exposing the corruption of Tunisia's dictatorship. Here's a heartfelt thank you to Chelsea Manning from a Tunisian.

Fascinating photo (released by Ben Ali's office) of dictator Ben Ali visiting the hospital bed of the desperate young man who set himself on fire in protest in Dec. 2010 -- the young man didn't live long enough to learn that his act led to the overthrow of Ben Ali after sustained, Internet-fueled nonviolent protests. 

Amid the protests, Tunisian rapper El General put out this widely-circulated music video against Ben Ali that urged people to join the protest. It led to his arrest for a few days. Soon after, the dictator fled. The song went on to become an anthem in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere.

U.S. jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie performs his classic jazz tune "Night in Tunisia," first recorded in 1944.

The country that invented 1st Amendment . . .

. . . and press freedom is less free than dozens of other countries, according to Reporters Without Borders' "World Press Freedom Index."

"Get lost, you A**hole," says president . . . on video

In 2008, then-President of France Nicolas Sarkozy was caught on video calling a disgruntled citizen an "idiot" or "dumbass" or "a**hole" (depending on translation). French politicians were having difficulty tolerating the scrutiny of online coverage (including online video) -- especially compared to deferential coverage they're accustomed to from traditional media.

A former U.S. president (then governor of Texas) caught on video

Mexico's "Yo Soy 132" Movement and the 2012 Election

This Internet-driven movement didn't alter the outcome of Mexico's July 2012 presidential election -- since the candidate being "imposed" by the two major TV networks ended up winning.  But the student activists of Yo Soy 132 had impact; they set up an historic presidential debate that was carried online (TV-promoted frontrunner, Enrique Pena Nieto, was the only candidate who didn't show up).  It was this video on You Tube that launched the movement, after a campus protest had embarrassed Pena Nieto.

Global Voices Online

Global Voices is a community of hundreds of writers, bloggers, experts and translators around the world who post reports from blogs and citizen media, emphasizing "voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media." For example, this 2014 Vlog post on Latin American subway musicians & performers. Or, a win for activists in Brazil. A win for the language rights of indigenous people in Mexico. 

This 2011 post features short videos from a competition on gender equality in the Ukraine.

This 2010 post features a public protest by a brave professor and blogger in China, offering himself as a slave.

Video camera and bloggers for human rights

Launched in 1992 with the help of musician Peter Gabriel, the nonprofit Witness.org began distributing video cameras in hopes of minimizing human rights abuses. Now they help and train people in the safe use of cell phones and cameras to record abuses. Their slogan: "See it. Film it. Change it."

The Israeli human rights group, B'Tzelem, provides cameras to Palestinians so they can record Israeli settlers who harass Palestinians, including incidents of intimidation in and around the Palestinian city of Hebron, which rightwing Israeli religious settlers believe God has bequeathed to Jews.

Vancouver Film School students created an inspiring video, "Iran, A Nation of Bloggers," and put it online months before the tech-fueled protests over Iran's disputed 2009 election.

Egyptian bloggers/"Facebookers" led pro-democracy uprising

With the Mubarak dictatorship in control of all major media in Egypt, brave Egyptian "citizen journalists" risked imprisonment and torture to blog or tweet about human rights abuses. Here's renowned Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas interviewed on BBC in January 2010. Over the years, Abbas was harassed, censored and assaulted by authorities -- and was briefly detained in Feb 2011 during the uprising.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous covered the 18-day uprising in 2011 for Democracy Now!, and he was the central character in an HBO documentary about the Egyptian revolution. For his work in Egypt, he was awarded (on IC campus in April 2012) the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media.  (Here's a paperback "Tweets from Tahrir.")

In June, 2010, Khaled Said was beaten to death by police in public for the crime of Internet use and, apparently, exposing police corruption. His martyrdom inspired protests and Internet organizing that led to the uprising six months later that ended the Mubarak dictatorship. Middle East-based Google exec and activist Wael Ghonim set up the galvanizing "We Are All Khaled Said" Facebook page in Arabic.  (Here's an English FB version of "We Are All Khaled Said.")

Upworthy.com

Upworthy.com promotes social/political issues virally -- often using visuals or video like this animation on advertising/media impact on girls.

Toronto Globe and Mail writer on who should be "the real celebrities"

The Globe and Mail is often described as The New York Times of Canada. In this column, a Globe and Mail writer covering the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) says it would be great if the journalists and critics in the documentary All Governments Lie (premiering at TIFF) were considered "the real celebrities" -- as opposed to the Hollywood stars striding across TIFF's red carpet. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm co-executive producer of All Governments Lie.)

. . .It’d sure be swell if people like Goodman–or Jeremy Scahill, or Glenn Greenwald, or John Carlos Frey, or Matt Taibbi, or Noam Chomsky, or any of the other fearless talking heads that pop up to speak harsh truth to power in All Governments Lie–were the real celebrities. It’s great that TIFF hosts these events, precisely because they seem to fly glaringly in the face of the festival’s general M.O. of uninterrupted pomp, scattered with a little circumstance.

Two journalists hold City of Chicago accountable for police killing of civilian

Two journalists and a lawyer in Chicago broke open the case of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald -- first the autopsy and then dashcam video footage that was seen all over the world.  Brandon Smith, whose suit forced release of the video, was barred (lack of credentials) from the news conference about the video and criminal charges against the policeman.  

Glenn Greenwald helped raise funds for Smith and Jamie Kalven's investigative Invisible Institute, and other  journalists who do police accountability reporting. Greenwald interviewed Smith:

GREENWALD: One of the things that I’ve always wondered about in reading about the work you did in this case is there are obviously a lot of big media outlets in Chicago like The Chicago Tribune and a bunch of network affiliates and other reasonably well founded media outlets. Why did it fall on you to pursue this case on the courts? . . . 

SMITH:  . . . It’s not so much like a really obvious failure it’s more of like, just a general trusting on their part of government and process. You know, I was a newspaper reporter for five years in Ohio and I got into the same groove of trusting my sources and like getting into a relationship with my sources. And so when they say, “Oh, the investigation is ongoing, to release a video would mean to screw up our investigation,” then I’m sorry to say that I was one of those reporters that just didn’t say boo to that. And over the years I’ve kind of developed this independent mindset that I think is really important in our work and I wish more people had it. 

Tavi Gevinson: fashion blogger at 11, editor-in-chief at 15

This interview was recorded when fashion blogger Tavi was 15, and had founded Rookie. At age 16, she appeared on Colbert Report. 

By age 17, she was costarring in a Hollywood movie ("Enough Said"). In 2014, at age 18, she became a Broadway actress in "This Is Our Youth," starring opposite Michael Cera.

"All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception and the Spirit of I.F. Stone"

New documentary featuring adversarial journalists who expose official lies will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Battle over WikiLeaks

In Dec. 2010, blogger Glenn Greenwald (a WikiLeaks supporter) explained journalistic independence to a CNN correspondent. WikiLeaks website is here. This leaked video (with more than 15 million YouTube views) shows the killing of employees of the Reuters news agency and wounding of children by a US attack helicopter in Iraq.

Photo above (click on blank rectangle) was taken in August 2012 when I visited the Ecuadoran embassy in London after WikiLeaks' founder had taken refuge inside; I was there days after the British government threatened to invade the embassy, a serious breach of international law.

Following in WikiLeaks footsteps is a new U.S.-based group, ExposeFacts.org.  (Full disclosure: I am an advisor).

On the 2016 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, the United States has fallen to 41st out of 180 countries -- largely because of "the government's war on whistleblowers who leak information about its surveillance activities, spying and foreign operation, especially those linked to counter-terrorism."

The man who inspired Edward Snowden to become a whistleblower was a previously brave NSA officer named Thomas Drake, who suffered consequences of a prosecution and now survives by working in an Apple store.

Local online watchdog nonprofit outlets trying to fill gaps

As dailies have shrunk, local online nonprofit news sites have sprouted, such as the well-funded VoiceofSanDiego.org ("Nonprofit News Powered by Members") and the professionally-staffed MinnPost.com ("a thoughtful approach to news"). Nationwide, local watchdog outlets are trying to figure out how to survive, reported Jodi Enda in a 2012 piece for American Journalism Review.

ProPublica does important, investigative journalism . . .

. . .  looking at various powerful institutions from Big Pharma to the Red Cross. Here's a piece by Justin Elliott questioning the evidence-free claim that NSA mass surveillance of all of us has thwarted 54 terror plots.

Are some journalists too cozy with their sources?

In 2003, a CNN executive actually boasted about having given the Pentagon an advisory role on who his on-air experts would be during the Iraq war. . . At 2007 Radio-Television Correspondents Association Dinner, top journalists (including then-NBC White House correspondent David Gregory) were literally dancing with a top source, controversial Bush aide Karl Rove. These are social/charitable events where journalists and newsmakers are expected to have some fun, but is it symbolic of too much coziness? . . . Whether dealing with political leaders or celebrity athletes, the quest to gain access to famous newsmakers can undermine independent journalism, according to indy TV host Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, one of the most successful independent web TV outlets.