Boston Bombing/ Media Meltdown

Memo to Journalism Students: This is what you should NOT do.  (H/t Karly)   Here's Mother Jones doing what it does very well: correcting mainstream media errors. (H/t Megan)

Rush to Misjudgement on Boston Marathon Story

Democracy Now! reports.

Public Access TV Channels . . .

...have offered diverse and local voices, launched careers, and led to Saturday Night Live spoofs from Mike Myers -- such as "Wayne's World" and "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman."

Why don't we have independent public TV like this in US?

Weeks before the Iraq invasion, the BBC's Jeremy Paxman and skeptical British citizens literally cross-examined Prime Minister Tony Blair about evidence/reasons/legality behind the invasion -- an interview whose transcript and Blair's comments became part of Britain's official Iraq inquiry in 2011. (Here's another tough Paxman interview of Blair . . . having nothing to do with Iraq.)

In our country, bullying from politicians + lack of insulated funding = embarrassing timidity at so-called "public television"...as evidenced by PBS surgically removing Tina Fey's comedic swipes at Sarah Palin from a broadcast in November 2010.

Country by country comparisons of spending on public broadcasting here. 

My column on media and militarism . . .

. . . generated nearly 1,000 comments on Huffington Post and a positive tweet from perhaps the greatest female tennis player ever.

Are we losing fast, open Internet in USA?

In recent studies, USA was behind other countries when it comes to access to broadband (15th place) and Internet speed  (23rd place).

There's a digital divide in our country whereby upper-middle-class kids grow up with fast Web-accessed computers at home, while kids in some rural areas and inner cities don't have fast Internet, or even computers.

In 2009, big Internet providers such as Verizon, Comcast, AT&T DID NOT APPLY for any of the billions in federal stimulus grants for expanding broadband infrastructure, according to the Wall St. Journal, because recipients of our tax money had to agree to respect Net Neutrality or Internet non-discrimination.

In August 2010, Keith Olbermann did a segment about Net Neutrality on his soon-to-end MSNBC show. Olbermann exited MSNBC as it was being taken over by Comcast, which lobbies against Net Neut. (Here's Jon Stewart's Net Neutrality segment from the same period.)

P.S. In January 2011, I was asked to appear on a talk-radio show on a big city station to analyze Oblermann's exit from MSNBC; when I suggested a link to the Comcast takeover and criticized Comcast's opposition to Net Neutrality, a producer asked me during a commercial break to stop the "Comcast-bashing" because "they're our biggest sponsor."

Did this blog inject distortions into mainstream media?

The late Andrew Breitbart, a former Drudge Report staffer, ran BigGovernment.com. In July 2010, the Obama White House fired US Dept of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod soon after BigGovernment posted a 100-second video excerpt purporting to show that, during a speech to the NAACP, Sherrod had boasted about discriminating against a white farmer while she was a federal employee during the Obama administration. Actually, as Breitbart later corrected, Sherrod was describing events in the 1980s when she was Georgia field director for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a nonprofit that had grown out of the civil rights movement to help Black farmers. More importantly, a fuller version of the speech aired by CNN indicated that Sherrod told the story to illustrate how she had overcome her racial hostility toward whites and ultimately helped the white farmer save his farm.

Months earlier, other selectively-edited tapes distributed by BigGovernment.com (played repeatedly on Fox News and elsewhere) helped put the anti-poverty group ACORN out of business. Rachel Maddow dissects the distorted presentation that doomed ACORN. (Fox News had goaded others in media for not doing enough ACORN-smearing.)

It wasn't just Fox News that promoted BigGovernment.com's misleading ACORN story. The Public Editor of the paper of record, the New York Times, went to absurd lengths to defend his paper's inaccurate coverage