Micah’s class – 5th blog

From 1996-99, I covered the Florida Legislature in Tallahassee for the Miami Herald. I had spent the previous seven years covering politics in Louisiana for The Times-Picayune, so I couldn’t help bu wonder in amazement as I learned about Florida’s “Sunshine” laws.

Actually, I didn’t just wonder in amazement. I quickly began taking advantage of all the laws that allowed the “sun” to shine on the legislature’s activities.

Two legislators meeting together was considered a “public” meeting, and I could join them if I learned about it. I found out when legislative strategy sessions took place and sat in.

All state records were public.  I asked key state legislators to give me copies of their weekly schedules so I could track what was happening.

In three years of covering Florida’s House, I cannot recall where a major move caught me by surprise. Louisiana’s legislature, in contrast, operates in the dark shadows, and it was difficult to follow exactly what was happening behind the scenes, where the real decisions took place.

So I’m a big supporter of making the legislative system as transparent as possible.

Still, I thought that Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig made valid points in his 2009 New Republic article, “Against Transparency.” 

Lessig wrote at length to argue that transparency can backfire. He focused on how the public can misinterpret news reports on the source of campaign contributions received by a congressman. Lessig said that more context and information is needed to fully understand how campaign contributions influence how a congressman votes. That’s a fair point. But I think we are worse off when big contributions are given in the dark. Knowing the source of the contributions at least gives us the identities of the influence-peddlers. One measure of why this matters is how often candidates try to hide the source of their major contributors. (I remember this happening particularly in Louisiana.)

Lessig marshals his arguments against transparency because he favors complete public funding of elections. He outlines his arguments in a 2011 book, “Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It.” Lessig is also one of the leaders of the Americans Elect movement that is attempting to put a credible third-party presidential candidate on the ballot of all 50 states. (I noticed that Lessig has 185,000 followers on Twitter, so he has won quite a following.)

I actually was more interested in the piece by Archon Fung and David Weil, “Open Government and Open Society.” I’ve done a lot of investigative reporting and have sometimes wondered if folks like myself are too focused on exposing wrong-doing and should be also pointing out the success stories of government (as Nick pointed out in class). Simply focusing on government wrong-doing does create the impression that hacks run government, which doesn’t give credit to the good work done by many solid government officials.

I think Fung and Weil make a good argument that we need more transparency from the private sector as well. In fact, government at all levels requires companies to provide a wealth of information on their activities. Investigative reporters regularly ferret out information to expose corporate wrong-doing.

What we really need are more investigative reporters!

 

Micah’s class – 4th blog

The Internet can empower individuals in politics. One example of this occurred in November 2004 when Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a MySpace page for Senator Barack Obama. As Micah Sifry described in 2007, the site became wildly popular — so much so that the Obama campaign decided it wanted to take over the site. Anthony sought compensation in return. The Obama campaign rejected his request and then took the extraordinary step of having MySpace take away the site from Anthony. He had 160,000 friends at the time.

While the episode ended badly for Anthony, his MySpace success demonstrated how an ordinary person can use the web to emerge and play a role in politics. And it was that narrative that David Plouffe and the Obama campaign seized as Obama fought Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination in 2008.

Several magazines (here, here and here) furthered the narrative after Obama’s election.

But by December 2009, Sifry was ready to declare the narrative more myth than reality. As Sifry wrote about Obama, ”we were told that his victory represented the empowerment of a bottom-up movement, powered by millions of small donors, grassroots volunteers, local field organizers and the internet.”

(Probably because Sifry is a journalist, his readings spoke most clearly to me. Thank goodness I’m not getting a grade in this class or Sifry might think I was trying to suck up to him

It was empowerment with clearly defined limits. Citing an October 2007 Zephyr Teachout column, Sifry wrote, “the [Obama] campaign shared tasks with its supporters but didn’t share power. In some notable cases, volunteers were given substantial responsibilities in the field, and access to more data than would typically be shared by most top-down organizations. But in terms of empowering anyone, Obama’s campaign structure empowered its managers more than anyone else.”

In her article, Teachout wrote that the Internet ”can increase a candidates’ control over activity, or it can enable the genuine distribution of power.” Clearly, Sifry believes that the Internet allowed the Obama campaign to better control its activities.

Sifry argued that Plouffe and the Obama team failed to try to empower those on the mailing list of 13 million people — or to try to give them real power — once Obama assumed the Oval Office. Only two million people advocated for Obama’s health care reform package, Sifry noted.

By early 2010, the Tea Party had become a roaring alternative to Obama. He lost control of the congressional agenda after passage of the health care package. By the November 2010 elections, Obama’s vaunted 13 million-person list of supporters seemed like a haunting memory. Millions of his supporters stayed home that election as Democrats lost control of the House and nearly lost the Senate.

The defeat put Obama on the defensive for much of 2011, as Congressional Republicans and their allies tagged him as a big-spending liberal who was trying to have government invade the lives of ordinary citizens. Obama could easily lose the 2012 presidential election.

Writing in December 2009, Sifry presciently predicted the problems that lay ahead for Obama.

“But I suspect that when the full history of Obama’s presidency is written, scholars may decide that his team’s failure to devote more attention to reinventing the bully pulpit in the digital age, and to carrying over more of the campaign’s grassroots energy, may turn out to be pivotal to evaluations of Obama’s success, or failure, as president.”

 

Micah’s class – 3rd blog

David Duke set Louisiana ablaze beginning in early 1989. The neo-Nazi sympathizer and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard won election to the Louisiana state House and instantly became a symbol of protest by whites against a system that they thought was stacked against them.

I had just joined The Times-Picayune newspaper when Duke was elected. Two months later, the paper’s editors assigned me to investigate Duke. Did we really know everything we should know about him? I would dog Duke for three years as he ran for the United States Senate, governor of Louisiana and finally president.

The class readings for Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” made me think back to those tumultuous days.

Shortly after Duke’s election, a group was created to oppose him. It was called the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. At the same time, Duke traveled the state and turned out hundreds of supporters practically everywhere he went to speak.

Shirky wrote that the Boston Globe exposed a pedophile priest in 1992. The “outrage dissipated with little change in the church’s behavior in Massachusetts or nationally, no official reaction from the Vatican, no coordinated calls by the laity for Law’s resignation, and no resignation,” Shirky wrote.

Shirky showed how the Internet has made it dramatically easier to organize groups. In 2002, the Globe exposed another pedophile priest, and this time, beginning with an outraged doctor, some 25,000 people across the country came together to create Voice of the Faithful. This time, the Catholic Church could not ignore them. The cardinal in Boston resigned and “the church began to take steps, if halting ones, to publicly reform itself.”

In 2002, Globe readers could email the newspaper’s articles to others with a click, and it was practically as easy to send them to a group as to an individual. Blogs popped up and further publicized the scandal. Ordinary citizens turned to email and blogs to organize themselves. This time, the Catholic Church could not stonewall them.

Zephyr Teachout wrote in “Come Together Right Now: The Internet’s Unlit Fuse” that the dilemma of collective action is that you’ll do something only if others will do it, too. As the 2002 Globe example showed, the new tools make it easier to overcome that dilemma.

It’s even easier today. New groups can use Facebook to get attention and attract supporters. They can amplify their voice through Twitter and any number of social media sites.

So I am left wondering about the old days. How is it that hundreds of people in Louisiana, around the same time as the initial Boston Globe priest expose, came together to create the Louisiana Coalition? How did Duke spread the word so ordinary folks would fill hotel meeting rooms across the state to hear him?

Because it was harder to organize before, does it mean that those who participated were more committed? Malcolm Gladwell certainly seems to think so, from his iconic New Yorker article.

I’m so familiar with today’s new tools that it seems hard to imagine how folks organized themselves before and overcame the collective action dilemma.

Micah’s class – 2nd blog

As a boy, I remember riding on El Camino Real in Palo Alto and seeing the local headquarters for the Elks and Kiwanis. For two years, I played on a Little League team sponsored by the Lions.

As Theda Skocpol wrote in “Diminished Democracy,” changes in society — especially the protests and demonstrations during the 1960s — have disrupted how we organize ourselves. Those civic groups are a casualty as a result.

Women, African-Americans and Latinos – who traditionally did not belong to the civic groups — have gotten better access to good jobs and good schooling in recent decades.

With the decline of the civic groups came the rise of advocacy groups, many of them based in Washington, D.C. They have been led by what Skocpol described as the “professional class” — highly educated and rootless people.

I have first-hand knowledge of that phenomenon because I set out for Washington after graduating from college and got a job as editor of “People & Taxes,” a monthly newspaper published by Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen.

I would defend my work and that of other idealistic colleagues, but the rise of groups like Public Citizen (on the left and the right) are a key part of what Skocpol describes as the diminished democracy. “Today’s advoacy groups are top-down, even when they claim to speak for ordinary people,” she wrote in Chapter 6. “A big gap has opened between local voluntary efforts and professional advocates who seek national influence.”

Another part of that “diminished democracy” could be what Yochai Benkler described in “The Wealth of Networks” as a top-down media where elite broadcasters and newspapers decided what news citizens would get. Ordinary people had a voice, at best, in the letters to the editor column.

The Internet has disrupted the top-down system described by Skocpol and Benkler. In the new “flat world,” anyone can have a platform. Ordinary people can push back against the experts and the mdia elites.

In “The Wealth of Networks,” Benkler also described how left-leaning citizens used the web to organize an advertising boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting in 2004 to protest its decision to braodcast a slanted documentary against John Kerry. He also described how ordinary citizens discovered that Diebold could potentially skew election results with its paper-less voter machines and then publicized these concerns, despite Diebold’s best efforts to stop them. Before Web 2.0, Sinclair and Diebold would have almost certainly pushed forwarded with few impediments. 

In the Digital Age, ordinary citizens can become pundits and gain a following.

In his talk yesterday at the Kennedy School, New York Times political writer Matt Bai described how a businessman in Utah — who thought government was becoming too intrusive — decided to organize a Tea Party movement in Utah using the tools of Social Media. This businessman was so successful that he is now running for governor of Utah, Bai said.

Bai applauded these new form of democracy. I applaud them, too.

 

Micah’s class – first blog

    

     I must confess that until I took Nicco Mele’s fall class, I had little understanding of how the Internet worked or even its underlying principles. I knew nothing about Google other than it served as a super search engine. I couldn’t have identified the meaning of “SEO.” Nicco’s class gave me the basic work tools and taught me basic web literacy.

     The initial class readings on the Internet’s founding fathers in Micah Sifry’s class have given me an even better understanding of the Internet today. The readings show me how their ethos led to the wide-open, decentralized nature we enjoy now.

     As Jonathan Zittrain and Stephen Crocker wrote — and as we have discussed in class — the founders worked in a collegial way and weren’t trying to profit from this new hobby/venture. As Zittrain wrote, “The early Internet designers kept it simple and trusted others to do right.” I loved Crocker’s comment: “They relied on ‘rough consensus and running code.’ There was plenty of natural pressure to adopt standards that worked for everybody.”

   John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto offered the clearest expression of the founding fathers’ radical idealism. “Governments, leave us alone,” he wrote. “You have no sovereignty where we gather….We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

     My sense is that this kind of thinking led to the innovation that has turned the world wide web from a toy for a few computer scientists in the 1970s to perhaps the most powerful media tool since the invention of the printing press. Openness encourages innovation, I believe.

     A New York Times story today on Facebook’s impending IPO captured the dizzying changes online. “Fifteen years ago, AOL was the Internet to most people, five years ago it was Google, now Facebook is the Internet,” said Lise Buyer, a former Google executive who helped guide the company’s initial public offering in 2004.

    IBM, as described by Zittrain, lasted decades before upstarts could challenge its dominance. Now it takes only five years online!

     I was interested in Monday’s class discussion about how Congress attempted to stifle the Internet with the 1996 Telecommunications Act (a measure that prompted Barlow’s screed) and the United Nations’ efforts to impose order. I can only think that we have a better world because they failed. I have to believe that the empowering and democratic forces unleashed by the web are playing a role in throwing out tyrants in the Middle East and reducing poverty in the developing world.

     Of course, the web is not all good. It disrupts industry after industry, and people lose jobs as a result. The downsizing of the Miami Herald, for example, cost me my job as the newspaper’s South American bureau chief. Whole industries are in retreat or are disappearing.

     Not all the people who use the web have good intentions. Bad guys unleash worms and try to steal our identities online. Governments are using and will continue to use the web to try to control the way we think.

     I do believe, on balance, however, that “computers can change your life for the better,” as Stephen Levy wrote in “The Hackers Ethic.” The good today results from the efforts of the founders who insisted on an open and decentralized web.

 

Journalism, Media & Technology

The past two weeks’ readings don’t paint a pretty picture for journalists, such as myself.

Clay Shirky wrote that we’re in for a period of constant change. One key comment of his: It’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace the old model. Anybody can publish anything anytime.

Craigs List has decimated classified ad revenue for newspapers. Readers have become accustomed to finding their news online for free instead of buying the printed newspaper. Newspaper executives have decimated their staffs. Thanks to blogs, readers can find plenty of information online. But I place more confidence in the work by independent, professional journalists.

I was fascinated by Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” theory. It could work for my favorite New Orleans funk band. I don’t see how it will help big-city newspapers. The scale is too small.

Dan Conover threw out a particularly distressing concept. Newspapers might begin to outsource content. Could the newspaper of the future simply have contract reporters who write for a pittance and don’t have health insurance? Poorer quality can only result.

Ned May showed us in class how computers can write simple articles all by themselves! Dios Mio!

Doc Searls said that viewers are willing to pay for the goods they use. But would it be possible to establish a system where readers pay small change for each article?

Amanda Michel’s “Get Off the Bus” piece left me unconvinced about the effectiveness of volunteer citizen journalists. Michel began her piece with what is presumably her best evidence: A citizen journalist was admitted to an Obama campaign event and recorded him making an impolitic statement about the gun culture. Yes, the citizen journalist got into an event closed to the mainstream press. But that Obama’s comment had a big echo required the mainstream media.

Michel also cites how “Off the Bus” sent out citizen journalists  to determine whether Obama’s anti-war message in late 2007 was a game-changer and reported that they found voters to be more concerned with domestic issues. I can only imagine that a competent political reporter would have pollsters saying the same thing.

I was more persuaded of why reporters ought to monitor political blogs by how Peter Daou anticipated what became the Swift Boat negative ads by tracking conservatives’ blogs. (Interestingly, Daou did not report this in his article, “The Triangle,” but Professor Nicco Mele mentioned it in class.)

But I tend to be an optimist, so let me focus on the positive. Some newspaper paywalls are working, such as the FT’s and the New York Times’. I attended a recent talk where the Boston Globe’s publisher and editor outlined their innovative paywall. Interestingly, they already have boston.com so they have created a new site that only paid subscribers can access. Marty Baron, the editor, said a core group of readers is willing to pay for solid reporting. If so, newspapers cannot cut too far without turning away some of their paying readers.

At the same time, after waiting too long, newspaper executives seem to be launching the innovations that Shirky says will be a constant part of life for the forseeable future. Besides the paywalls, newspapers are no longer waiting until tomorrow to report the big news of the day. They are constantly updating their websites. They are beginning to use video and slide shows, although newspaper editors interviewing their reporters often seems like a high school production.

Some newspapers, such as the Guardian, are even beginning to experiment with crowdsourcing to choose topics to cover. Reporters are finding ways to get better stories thanks to Twitter and Facebook.

Finally, I take comfort from Shirky and Jaron Lanier arguing that good journalism is badly needed, in whatever form it is delivered. “Society doesn’t need newspapers,” Shirky wrote in “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” “It does need journalists.”

So I will hope that newspaper publishers and editors will find ways to make enough money so reporters like me can continue to write big-impact stories.

 

Wikipedia – 3rd blog

To begin, here is my Wikipedia user page. You’ll see that I couldn’t figure out some of the coding.

I have chosen the Wikipedia article on Buddy Roemer. I first met him in 1989 when I was a new reporter at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, and Roemer was midway through his term as governor of Louisiana. Over the next couple of years, I raised his ire several times with aggressive reporting and questioning. After one testy press conference exchange, Roemer told me in his north Louisiana twang, “Bridges, you need a shave and a haircut.” The truth is that I did. A New Orleans weekly noted that I came to work the next day freshly shorn.

I covered Roemer as he lost his 1991 re-election campaign and as he lost a 1995 bid for his old office. I got to know him well during the 1995 campaign, when I accompanied him on long drives in his car and on his small campaign plane.

I stayed in touch with Roemer after the ’95 defeat as he started a company that built apartments for retired folks near college campuses (that they might have attended) and founded a Baton Rouge-based bank.

Roemer played an important role in my two books on Louisiana politics, The Rise of David Duke and Bad Bet on the Bayou: The Rise of Gambling in Louisiana and the Fall of Governor Edwin Edwards.

I’m guessing that no other reporter knows him better.

I called Roemer earlier this year  after I read the unlikely news that he was planning to run for president in the Republican primaries. He took 30 minutes to explain his thinking. It was obviously a very long shot, but I have adopted a philosophy of not making snap judgments about why something may or may not happen in politics. So I have refused to count him out.

The Wikipedia article provides a good summary of Roemer’s career. It is written in a neutral fashion and provides good sourcing.

Some time soon, I plan to beef up some missing information. I think the article should make it clearer that Roemer has never fit well in either the Republican or Democratic parties. The article should highlight the Shakespearian drama that played out in the 1987 election when Roemer sought to “slay the dragon,” Edwin Edwards, who had employed Roemer’s father as his chief assistant only several years earlier, before Roemer’s father went to prison.

The article should highlight Roemer’s attempt to end the coziness that Louisiana’s major polluting industries traditionally enjoyed with the governor. It should also highlight the irony of the moralistic Roemer ushering in the state’s era of modern legalized gambling.

The article gives short shrift to Roemer’s 1991 decision to switch political parties. He became the first sitting governor in American history to do so. The article doesn’t mention a prime reason behind the switch: Roemer wanted to run for president in 1996 and believed that he stood a better chance of winning the Republican Party nomination.

Now,  many years later, Roemer is running for president. The Wikipedia article needs more information on Roemer’s presidential bid. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a longshot. But it is intriguing. He is capping his campaign contributions at $100 per donor in a bid to emhasize the corrupting influence of money in politics — a stand that separates him from all of the other Republican candidates. He is also challenging the United States’ trade policies with China and decrying the role of Wall Street in our economic system — again, unlike any of the other Republican candidates.

Roemer told me the other day that when he makes these points in living rooms or town hall meetings throughout New Hampshire, he typically gets a standing ovation. But he is being shut out of the debates. So his campaign voice is but a whisper, and he is only a blip in the polls that determine who gets to appear in the debates. So he faces a Catch-22 situation.

The Wikipedia page needs to be updated with the latest information on this intriguing presidential candidate, even though he is likely to fail to make a ripple in the campaign.