The Mental Munition Factory

Images from Drone Causes Federal Investigation

2012-01-26T12:00:00.000-06:00

In what is possibly the first major exposé initiated through drone technology, a small unmanned craft captured evidence of environmental contamination in Texas.

sUAS News reported that a Dallas drone enthusiast was testing a drone, named “Exposure,” when he captured images of what appeared to be a polluted creek near a meat packing plant.

“I was looking at images after the flight that showed a blood red creek and was thinking, could this really be what I think it is?” he told sUAS news. “Can you really do that? Surely not.”

The hobbyist called a Coast Guard 1-800 number, and state environmental investigators reached the creek 40 minutes after the call.

The Environmental Protection Agency, and several state environmental authorities, executed a search warrant at the Columbia Packing Company on January 19. A criminal investigation is now underway.

The Fox 4 station in Dallas reported that the plant was still operational during the investigation. Field tests from Texas Parks and Wildlife indicated pig blood and toxic chemicals had been dumped in the plant, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Local news outlets seem to have glossed over the fact that the aerial photos which launched the criminal investigation were taken by a drone, and none seem to have tracked down or interviewed the pilot. Additionally, sUAS News declined to publish the drone pilot’s name, citing concerns about the ongoing investigation.

The pilot’s secrecy may stem from a concern about his own safety and well-being after exposing possible criminal activity (potentially involving persons with power and money). But a commenter in the sUAS story also pointed out that this might also be about the hobbyist protecting his pastime – aerial imagery and drone piloting – from scrutiny and harsh regulation.

The reason for his secrecy may be a combination of both those things, or things yet unpublished. All accounts suggest he was a regular RC pilot, without pretense, who simply stumbled on criminal activity near a Dallas meat packing plant. But this shows exactly what drone journalists are aiming for, and demonstrates what is possible when you combine small, inexpensive airframes with imaging equipment.

Drone journalists, news orgs and nonprofits should make a mental note of this event and learn a thing or two from it. A good way to start a systematic investigative report on the local environment would be to take photos of creeks and tributaries near industrial operations.

Images:
1) Aerial photo of the contaminated creek, ostensibly taken by the drone pilot, as published by DMN in an online photo gallery.
2) The Exposure airframe, which is capable of carrying a DSLR camera.

Learning from Crashing in Micro-Drone Journalism

2012-01-19T09:30:00.000-06:00

If you are interested in getting started in dronejournalism, I highly suggest you first try a small, cheap, indoor RChelicopter equipped with a low-resolution camera.

It will go up into the air, hit something, fall to theground. And the images will not be great. And sometimes it will just fall overfor no apparent reason. And you will fail.

Why chose to fail? Despite howadvanced our drone technology has gotten, despite the fact that you can programa microcontroller to automatically fly your helicopter, you still need tounderstand how things can shake out in the air.

This is my first-ever journalism drone, dubbed “theJournoCopter” by my fiancée. It’s actually a toy called the “Hawk Eye,” and it’smade by the Spinmaster company under the Air Hogs brand of remote-controlled flyingtoys. They can be found for between $50 and $70 online, but I was fortunateenough to locate this one on clearance at a Target for $41.

The micro-copter operates via a two-channel remotecontrol. That means there are two discreet frequencies that each control adistinct flight characteristic. For this micro-copter, one of the channels isthe throttle for the rotors (makes it go up and down), while the other adjuststhe speed of the rotors to allow the helicopter to rotate and change direction(left and right).

In addition to the sticks for throttle and direction onthe controller, there’s shoulder-mounted buttons for still-frame photographyand video. The helicopter can take more than a hundred photos at 640 x 480 (VGAresolution), and about five minutes of video at 320 x 240 (QVGA resolution). Toget the photos and videos to a computer, the helicopter docks with thecontroller, and the controller docks to a computer via USB cable (included).Interfacing with the computer also charges the lithium-polymer battery in the micro-copter.It takes about 25 minutes to charge the micro-copter’s lithium polymer batteryfrom USB.

How does it handle? It doesn’t so much handle as itconstantly drifts forward uncontrollably, leaving you to rotate the helicopter sothat it doesn’t run into anything. Flying it outdoors is a challenge, as thissmall copter is influenced by the slightest of winds. And because thismicro-copter is controlled via infrared (IR) rather than radio control (RC),much like a television is controlled by an IR remote, direct sunlight willoverpower the receiver and sever all communication.

Therefore, it’s best to fly it indoors. However, mostpeople don’t like to be confined in a room with a fast-spinning object thatthey have no control over. Which brings me back to why this JournoCopterfailure is actually a good thing for drone journalism. By experimenting with asmall, cheap, finicky drone, you’re going to realize all of the little problemsthat could manifest themselves as a big problem in a larger, more expensivedrone – because all of them will happen to you right from the start.

What do you do when the wind is too strong? How long doyou expect the battery to last, and how will you know before it’s too late? Doyou know how this flying object is going to behave? The limits of the flyingobject? Where are the people, and how do you keep a safe distance from them whilestill getting the shot? Because if worse comes to worse, you need to beprepared to take control and land your drone without harming anyone. You’lllearn these lessons while earning the fine motor skills that you’ll need topilot a wide variety of craft.

I don’t mean to denigrate this little wonder, either. Forless than $100, this company has managed to deliver a remote-controlledhelicopter with a two-mode camera, with onboard memory, that can actually fly.Plus, it’s pretty damn indestructible.

But I would, actually, steer aspiring drone journaliststo spend just a little more money for a drone that has a smaller failure rate.I cannot vouch for them, but this Egofly LT-712 Spyhawk and this Silverlit SpyCam cost a little more but might offer better control.

The International Journalists Network recently publisheda list of the top “Five gadgets from CES that are ideal for journalists,” whichincluded two micro-copters for drone journalism. Those might also be worthlooking into.

A breakthrough in data visualization, what it means for data journalism, predicting the news

2011-12-19T09:30:00.000-06:00

Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation announced a new system to help researchers make sense of stores of scientific papers, and potentially find the “next big thing.”

The Action Science Explorer, or ASE, developed jointly by University of Michigan and University of Maryland faculty, takes a difficult cognitive task -- backtracking through paper citations to identify a breakthrough -- and “offloads” it to the much easier task of perceiving density in network visualizations. In other words, it takes mounds of difficult to digest research, and uses social network analysis techniques and graphing to make the information immediately recognizable.

The ASE visually represents papers and concepts as they appear over time, identifies the moment where fields branched out and flourished, and also finds moments where other research became obsolete or lost. It also identifies emerging fields of study:

“Users can quickly appreciate the strength of relationships between groups of papers and see bridging papers that bring together established fields. Even more potent for those studying emerging fields is the capacity to explore an evolutionary visualization using a temporal slider. Temporal visualizations can show the appearance of an initial paper, the gradual increase in papers that cite it, and sometimes the explosion of activity for ‘hot’ topics. Other temporal phenomena are the bridging of communities, fracturing of research topics, and sometimes the demise of a hypotheses.”

(from the ASE tech report)

Here’s how it works:

The ASE researchers say this software has potential in the fields of linguistics, biology and sociology, writing “Both students and educators must have access to accurate surveys of previous work, ranging from short summaries to in-depth historical notes. Government decision-makers must learn about different scientific fields to determine funding priorities.”

But suppose data journalists use similar tools to analyze legislation over time, to forecast future bills and political alliances. Clusters would indicate where certain provisions failed, where lobbyists and special interests had influenced legislation the most, and possibly how those interests would proceed in the future. Instead of conducting reactionary reporting, or relying on too-late intelligence that lets legislation slip through unnoticed, reporters could use the system to help guide questions and investigations.

In September, computer scientist Kalev Leetaru here on the University of Illinois campus did something just as remarkable. He compiled more than 100 million media reports, text-mined and crunched them in a supercomputer, and was able to chart and even predict the instability in Libya and Egypt.

Impressively, Leetaru was also able to use those news reports to estimate the location of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Ladin with a 200km degree of accuracy. From the BBC news, who reported on Leetaru’s research:

The computer event analysis model appears to give forewarning of major events, based on deteriorating sentiment.
However, in the case of this study, its analysis is applied to things that have already happened.
According to Kalev Leetaru, such a system could easily be adapted to work in real time, giving an element of foresight.
"That's the next stage," said Mr Leetaru, who is already working on developing the technology.
"It looks like a stock ticker in many regards and you know what direction it has been heading the last few minutes and you want to know where it is heading in the next few.

“Predictive reporting” or “news forecasting” could prove invaluable to digital newsrooms, where seconds mean the difference between breaking the news and just being one of the reporting mob. And if news agencies work on integrating advances in computer and information science into the office, instead of just reporting on them, it could enhance reporting across the entire organization.

Founding a Professional Society of Drone Journalists

2011-12-14T09:30:00.000-06:00

It’s been quite a month for drones. After Iranian armed forces captured one of the coveted American RQ170 stealth drones, the very same stealth drone that pierced Pakistani airspace to spy on Osama bin Laden, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman released previously unpublished photos of the carnage that U.S. military drones unleashed in Waziristan.

Later, the Los Angeles Times wrote about how the U.S. Customs and Boarder Protection lent a Predator B drone to North Dakota law enforcement. Sheriffs in Nelson County, N.D., fearing a search for missing cattle would end with deadly firefight with a “sovereign citizen” group, spied on the group and arrested members after the drone revealed they were unarmed. The report went on to reveal that local law enforcement had used Predators stationed at the Grand Forks Air Base for at least two dozen surveillance flights since June, and the FBI and DEA have used Predators in their own investigations.

Salon’s Glen Greenwald warned of the expansion of domestic drones, and the sizable lobbying power of drone contractors in Congress, writing “the escalating addition of drones — weaponized or even just surveillance — to the vast arsenal of domestic weapons that already exist is a serious, consequential development. The fact that it has happened with almost no debate and no real legal authorization is itself highly significant.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post dedicated its December 4 front page to the Israeli military’s use of drones in Gaza. But one Post reporter asked the question that journalists like me have been wondering for some time: What’s the potential use for drones in journalism?

Melissa Bell’s piece, “Drone journalism? The idea could fly in the U.S.” mentions my writing on a drone journalism Google group, where I mention that drone technology could help journalists “to take water or air samples or to scan for topographical data to make assessments about industrial impact on the environment.”

Bell mentioned Matt Waite, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln and developer of Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact, who just began the world’s first drone journalism lab. Waite unveiled his plan for a drone journalism lab at a News Foo conference, where the immediate reaction was skepticism.

“News Foo had a number of tech people very interested in and sensitive to privacy issues and they were quite wary,” Waite told data journalist Ben Welsh. “They immediately went to TMZ+Lindsay Lohan as an example of how drones could be misused.

“So when I started thinking about this idea, I immediately thought that people would rightfully be wary of this and that the sooner we started talking about ethics and laws, the sooner we could have answers for criticisms and guidelines to balance the public’s right to know and people’s expectations of privacy.”

I was unaware of Waite’s announcement, or his drone journalism lab, until the WaPo story. But given the most spectacular breach of journalism ethics in recent history (the News of the World/NewsCorp phone hacking scandal), it was not lost on me how important it would be to establish a code of ethics for drone journalists. The code of ethics would be deliberated and drawn up by experts in the field, similar to the way the Society of Professional Journalists developed and supported its code of ethics.

To that end, I purchased Dronejournalism.org as the future home of the Professional Society of Drone Journalists (PSDJ). At the time of this post, the website is dominated by a placard that displays the mission statement of the PSDJ: “Dedicated to developing the ethical, educational and technological framework for the emerging field of drone journalism.”

I also called Waite to bounce ideas about the first professional organization for drone journalists. One of his ideas was that the organization pursues a code of ethics via Wiki-style collaboration, but that the collaboration should only involve experts and practitioners of drone journalism. He, too, realized the need for an organization to help pull down a concrete ethical framework for journalists.

“This is really cool on one side, really creepy on the other,” Waite said in the conversation. “I think you are being dishonest if you are on the cool side, not thinking there’s something creepy about [drone journalism]. There’s a significant opportunity for mayhem and privacy violations.”

On the other hand, he said, “I think you are missing the point if you don’t see the amazing things you can do with the technology.”

For an example, Waite pointed out that Russian citizen journalists had employed an SLR-equipped drone to obtain aerial shots of a recent protest. The Daily Beast, one of the first news organizations to use a drone, surveyed tornado damage in Joplin, Missouri, and flood damage in Natchez, Mississippi and Minot, North Dakota.

Video from a citizen journalist capturing footage during Poland protests.

Waite said one of the first things he’s going to try to do with his first drones is attempt to violate his own privacy. And, of course, if the drone does violate his privacy, that would make a first case study for developing an ethical framework for drone journalism. “I could stand on a public sidewalk and see if I can’t get a drone high enough to get into my backyard with my kids with a sign that says ‘you’re violating my privacy,’” he said.

But there’s two other components to the PSDJ besides ethics: education and technology. We need to teach journalists how to use the equipment safely and effectively, and we need to keep journalists at the forefront of civil drone technology.

Waite used a $1,000 grant from the company he founded to purchase an off-the-shelf drone, the AR Drone quadcopter by Parrot, to be equipped later with a GoPro HD video recorder. Out of the box, the AR Drone provides a relatively stable platform for shooting video, and is controllable by iPhone or Android smartphone. Steve Doig, a Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist who teaches at ASU, also is experimenting with the AR Drone platform.

"You can get it at Brookstone in the mall," Waite said. "It's got an API and you can hack it. It's made of stock parts. You can controll it from your smartphone. And it's cheap."

A Parrot AR Drone in flight.

The next step for me will likely be purchasing the same drone and outfitting it in the same fashion. Not too much later, I hope to be able to develop some Arduino-based, fixed-wing aircraft to shoot photos along a predetermined path, and stitch those photos together later. But Waite and I know this is just a starting point; an inexpensive, yet effective demonstration of the concept. From there, it’s experimentation and learning.

“What I would love to do, once we have these platforms, is let’s cover some news,” Waite said. “A house fire in your city. Spring floods. There will be tornadoes, it’s as predictable as the sun coming up. Let’s cover them and write about our experiences and through those.”

Being a More Versatile Journalist: Data Journalism Veteran Steve Doig Wants Journalists to Know Statistics

2011-11-30T08:30:00.000-06:00

Aerial photograph of the devastation from hurricane Andrew in 1992. Steve Doig, who was a reporter for the Miami Herald at the time, used his data journalism chops to survey the damage and write a Pulitzer-prize winning expose on construction malpractice. Earlier this year, I asked him what aspiring data journalists should be learning.

I cringe when bloggers begin a post by apologizing to readers for a lack of updates. This is partly because most people do, or should, understand that the gig doesn’t pay. But mostly, every word you waste on explaining your absence is one more chance for a reader to lose interest and go somewhere else. So I’ll just say it’s been an eventful couple of months, and tell you why it’s actually relevant to this blog.

Having just finished a master’s in journalism at the University of Illinois, I was extremely lucky to find a National Science Foundation grant that is training better K-12 science teachers.

At the grant, we do this by teaching lessons in entrepreneurial leadership to science teachers. That translates into experiences like students constructing their own spectrophotometers, or high school students manufacturing their own biofuel, or even collaborations where high school students set up demonstrations on electricity for grade school students to work through.

It’s a radical, but practical approach that hopes to improve the nation’s competitiveness in science teaching. In January, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress report card on teaching showed that 47 percent of all high school seniors in the country are deficient in the sciences.

Why would an NSF grant want a journalist? For one, I understood their language. Being a former undergraduate student of mechanical engineering, I had taken chemistry, physics, calculus, and statistics courses. Secondly, they wanted someone experienced in the ways of conducting interviews (i.e., collecting data) and translating the information into an easily digestible form (i.e., not only help write reports for the NSF but also write for public dissemination).

That was all they were looking for initially, until I mentioned I had worked with NodeXL, a template that turns Microsoft Excel into a tool for analyzing social networks. I was introduced to the program by Brant Houston, in his investigative reporting class at the university. The Excel plug-in comes in handy during an investigation when you need to do things like plot like the flow of money or political influence within organizations or among groups of people. As it turns out, the grant was conducting a first-of-its kind analysis of teaching networks and needed someone with my expertise.

The moral of this story could be that if you develop skills beyond traditional journalism in undergraduate/graduate school, it’s easier to parlay your skills into a new career when the journalism jobs market tanks. But the fact is I’m still practicing journalism, albeit during my off-hours.

I recently submitted an investigation of a local church with more than $100,000 in tax liens to CU-CitizenAccess.org, a Knight foundation-funded community news website. The investigation required digging up and looking through nonprofit tax records, federal tax liens, city ordinances, and even credit union call reports. The investigation stemmed from a legal notice I stumbled upon in the aforementioned investigative journalism class.

Rather, this is why a journalist should learn data journalism: to become a more versatile investigator.

When I was teaching introductory journalism classes to freshmen and sophomore university students, I wanted them to know exactly why it’s useful to have computer and data journalism skills. So I put together a presentation on data journalism for a lecture of about 100 students, and asked data journalism veteran Steve Doig, who is currently the Knight Chair at the Walter Cronkite school of journalism, for a few bits of advice.

More on Doig later. But first, it was important to set the scene for the students.

It’s 1992. Cell phones were bulky and cumbersome. Starbucks had just recently gone public, but hadn’t begun its rapid expansion or executing its plan for world domination. The standard internet connection came in at a blistering 14.4 kbps, that is, if you had one at all.

The internet didn’t look like anything it did today. But it was rapidly changing, and in profound ways. The first visual browser, Mosaic, had just been developed – just a few blocks away here on the U of I campus, I pointed out to the students – at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

So, 1992 was a good year for the internet. But it was a horrible year for Florida, which suffered one of the worst natural disasters in recent history.

Radar image of Andrew.

At category five, Hurricane Andrew was the strongest kind of hurricane. Its winds gusted up to 177 mph. That made it damaging enough to be the costliest hurricane on record, that was, until hurricane Katrina. Andrew caused tens of billions of dollars in property damage. More than 90,000 homes were decimated.

Tens of thousands of people were left homeless, and the National Guard set up tents and distributed MRE's -- or “Meals Ready to Eat.”

Steve Doig, who was a reporter for the Miami Herald at the time, had the roof of his home blown off. But his was a fairly new home, and he figured it should have weathered Andrew better. This made him wonder if contractors weren’t building houses as sturdy as they should have been.

Like reporters do during natural disasters, the Miami Herald reporters started immediately covering the aftermath and cleanup efforts. But other Herald reporters started thinking over Doig’s question about house construction.

Much like other parts of the country, Dade County Florida was experiencing both urban sprawl and a housing boom. Developers were buying up large, cheap tracts of land and suburbanizing plots of land outside Miami with new houses. And just a cursory drive through these subdivisions, Doig got a sense that the newest suburbs, with the newest houses, didn’t fare as well as older houses.

If the newest houses didn’t fare as well, didn’t that mean there was something wrong with the newer building codes? Were the building codes being relaxed so that developers could make a quick buck? Were homeowners being taken advantage of?

Aerial photos of damage following hurricane Andrew.

These were questions Doig and others at the Herald wondered, but did not immediately have the resources to find the answers. Reporters could ask homeowners. They could ask building inspectors. But what the Herald really needed were cold hard facts – facts about the damage of the houses, facts about the age of the homes in the area, and facts about the intensity of the storm.

Herald reporters learned that the American Red Cross was doing a study of the damage of the area, so they asked for a copy of the information. But the information wasn’t perfect. For one, it was mostly a collection of notes, and nothing neat and convenient like a spreadsheet that reporters could easily search, index and compare entries. So they couldn’t use the Red Cross data.

Doig was able to find a database made by Dade county. But that had only about 8,000 of the damaged homes, which was about 10 percent of all the property damage. It wasn’t a huge sample size, but it did have a property identification number and whether that property was still habitable or not -- and that proved immensely useful.

With the property identification number, Doig could do all sorts of things. He could take that number, and look in the county assessment records -- because local governments keep tabs on every house’s assessed value for property tax purposes -- and then from that they could know how much the property was worth, where it was built and also (very importantly) when it was built.

Now Herald reporters knew when the houses were built, and how many of those survived and how many didn’t. But the reporters still had to find out how big a role the intensity of the hurricane played in the disaster. To do that, reporters needed something meteorologists call a wind contour map, which estimates the speed of the hurricane at different spots on the ground.

The wind contour map, as published by the Miami Herald.

Doig kept collecting information as soon as it was recorded: the damage of the house, what kinds of winds it experienced, and when it was constructed. And when he overlaid these three sets of information were on a map, he saw a visual pattern. The newer a house was, the more likely it was to fail under the hurricane.

Here’s what that information looks like in a different visual configuration -- a bar chart. It’s more clear in this visualization that newer homes fared worse in high winds, but also that they performed poorly in the lower wind speeds.

Doig and the Herald had the data. They had the proof. But was that where they stopped? No, that was just the start. Then they started asking questions.

They could say with certainty that the newer homes weren’t built as sturdy. This gave them ammunition to confront the builders with the question “Your newer homes weren’t safe enough. How come?” That gave them an enormous advantage in the investigation, and that helped them uncover something pretty startling.

Doig’s roof came off. As it turned out, builders were using staples to hold the roofs together in Miami houses to save money. And it turns out there were so many houses getting built that the building inspectors were overwhelmed with work, and they were inspecting about four times as many homes as they were supposed to. It was gross negligence on a massive scale.

Doig worked with the databases, asked the questions, did the investigation and published a 16 page report called “What Went Wrong.” And for their efforts, they were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. And none of it could have been possible without the knowhow to use the data that was right in front of them.

Andrew was a long time ago, but Doig’s Pulitzer is a historical marker as to when data journalism really started in earnest. Yet many mainstream media operations, and unfortunately many journalism schools, are still largely clueless about data journalism. This is despite all the computer networking and personal computing power at our disposal, despite the fact that any enterprising individual can find lessons and knowledge about computer programming and statistical analysis immediately, and for free.

It’s a conundrum. While there’s a clear need for journalists who understand computers and aren’t afraid of numbers, and the job market for them is growing, journalists with these skills sometimes find themselves underutilized in an industry that hasn’t caught up with them. Because of this lack of interest, to succeed at data journalism, a journalist has to be proactive, self-learning, and constantly augmenting his or her skill set. So several months ago I asked Doig if he had any advice for aspiring data journalists.

“Take a basic statistics class,” began Doig’s email. “That was something I failed to do while I was in college, and I've spent my career slowly and painfully teaching myself how to do things I could have quickly learned in a semester in college. But try to take that class in the sociology or political science department, because the examples they will use will resonate better for journalists than those in a stats class taught by the math department.”

Doig had taken a calculus class in his freshman year at Dartmouth in 1966, and only earned a “so-so” grade. But his math teacher had helped co-author the BASIC computer language, and so Doig had his first brush with computer programming at the time.

It wasn’t until 15 years later that the personal computer revolution had whittled the size and price of computers down to something a reporter could buy. When Doig was working as a reporter in Tallahassee in 1981, he purchased an Atari 800 computer and started putting his BASIC skills to work.

“So I got the Atari and began learning to make it do fun things,” he wrote. “But I also began to realize I could make it do work that would help me in my job covering state government in Tallahassee.”

“One thing I recall is writing a program in BASIC that would take a legislative rollcall vote and parse it out by various political demographics beyond simple Dems vs. GOPs: rural vs. urban, upstate vs downstate, race, gender, leadership vs. rank-and-file, etc. It also wrote out the ‘how they voted’ agate type that had always been a pain to type in as a sidebar to our stories.”

As an aside, it’s important to note that Doig’s used his experience in working with voting statistics in 2000, during the much-contested Florida recount in the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush. He concluded that had Florida had an error-free count of the votes in that presidential election, Al Gore would have won the state, and therefore the presidency.

“The real importance of the Atari, though, was how it opened up to me the possibilities of analyzing data for stories, data that would be too tedious to analyze by hand,” Doig wrote.

“All my later success, including my role in the Hurricane Andrew Pulitzer, is thanks to the running start I got by playing around with that Atari 800.”

Read the scans of the entire 16-page series, "What Went Wrong," on Flickr.

You’re not a newspaper, you’re an intelligence agency for the people: musing on the “Page One” documentary.

2011-09-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

Media and culture columnist David Carr, left, meets with media desk editor Bruce Headlam, right in the
Magnolia Pictures documentary "Page One."

When the New York Times unveiled the porous pay wall, it showed the world an experiment to find a potential model to fund journalism: If you read more than 20 of our articles a month, we’re going to need some kind compensation.

When that news organization announced in July that its combined paid digital readership was near 400,000 after just four months (a figure that includes Kindle users), bloggers and media analyst began to speculate that NYT’s plan was working.

Some of these same people pointed out that those digital subscribers may only bring in $100 million, whereas the entire revenue for the Times is near $2 billion. For comparison, digital advertising yields $350 million.

Critics pointed to this fact and cried that the Times was changing dollars for pennies. Yet other analysts insisted that since digital subscribers can now be quantified and targeted, digital ad revenue would likely see an increase. (It’s accepted that a person who pays even $1 for a magazine or other print item is much more valuable to advertisers than a person who picks up a free publication.)

The documentarians making the movie “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times” had unlimited access to the Times during filming, and they used this to set up the tension behind that business move. As the movie slowly made its way across the United States, it meandered into our beloved local art theater just in time for a documentary film festival on Sept. 11.

There weren’t any documentaries about the attack that occurred on that day ten years ago. But “Page One” seemed as good a substitute as anything, given the important role the news media played before, during and after that event. While the film was stilted in favor of the Times, it did pause to muse on the failure of Judith Miller, a reporter who passed along unverified, propagandistic misinformation about the existence of WMDs in Iraq.

“Page One” managed to set up several plotlines over the course of that year: the redemption of a former crack-addict turned esteemed Times reporter (David Carr), the release of state secrets at the hands of WikiLeaks and what that meant for traditional news agencies, and the failure of the print news industry to adapt to the digital age.

Harsh critics will note that between those subjects, the film maintains all the focus of a candy-fueled adolescent with an attention deficit. The ride comes to an end before any of the plots have a chance to mature.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have moments of brilliance. One of the biggest moments in the film happens when David Carr, the Times media reporter and blogger, investigates the unraveling of the Tribune Company (which publishes the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times) at the hands of real estate tycoon Sam Zell. Between the complaints of sexual harassment, financial mismanagement, cronyism, and a clip of Zell proclaiming to reporters that his newspapers should have a “porn section,” it becomes obvious that it’s not just technology that has decimated the Great American Newspaper.

Carr, by the way, steals the show. He’s a gruff-speaking, hard-nosed reporter who is neither an outsider nor immortalized as a bust in the vaunted halls of journalism. A man who has the ultimate BS detector installed, he lambasted “Vice Magazine” reporters for wasting footage on documenting a shit-covered African beach, while praising his own organization for reporting on genocide in the same region. And yet he still has the humility to drop comedic references about his paper’s hubris while reclined at the Media Desk.

“I can think of no greater compliment than that he reminds me of the reporters I held in awe when I first went to work for newspapers,” Roger Ebert wrote of Carr.

Emblematic of a classic reporter, Carr is suspicious of the encroachment of technology into journalism. He doesn’t see part-time, unpaid bloggers ever producing content on the level of professional, full-time reporters. “Oh, that’s a great reading experience,” Carr said, flipping through virtual pages on a colleague’s shiny, new Apple iPad. “You know what that reminds me of? A newspaper.”

When “Cablegate” hits the Times, the WikiLeaks organization releases some 260,000 confidential diplomatic cables to news agencies, and reporters question whether the Times needs WikiLeaks, or whether it’s the other way around.

The documentary draws links between the release of the Pentagon Papers, in which the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg sought the help of the Times to publicize the misdeeds of the Johnson Administration in the lead-up to the Vietnam war. A key difference this time, however, was that WikiLeaks had the power to publish all the cables independent of any news organization (and so they did). The inherent question was whether the digital age needed professional journalists at all.

The most important lesson about WikiLeaks goes unfilmed. It wasn’t so much that WikiLeaks needed the publicity from the mainstream media. The publicity helped, to be sure, but the cables were going to be released regardless. And it wasn’t as if Assange sought to elevate the prestige or credibility of his information by filtering it through the clout of major, respected newspapers. Assange felt that that his organization was “casting pearls before swine.”

No. The work between Julian Assange, the Times, the Guardian and other news agencies was a collaboration. Assange needed the manpower from news agencies to sift through those 260,000 cables and produce something of value.

“Back in New York we assembled a team of reporters, data experts and editors and quartered them in an out-of-the-way office,” wrote Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times at the time, in his article on the collaboration “Dealing With Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets.”

“Andrew Lehren, of our computer-assisted-reporting unit, did the first cut, searching terms on his own or those suggested by other reporters, compiling batches of relevant documents and summarizing the contents. We assigned reporters to specific areas in which they had expertise and gave them password access to rummage in the data. This became the routine we would follow with subsequent archives.”

In April 2011, Assange wrote in the New Statesman that WikiLeaks was meant to mirror the early twentieth century radical press, in that it should supply a space to expose the transgressions of the powerful. He claimed the Times acted with hostility in the Cablegate affair, and that it harbored a bias towards the establishment.

It shouldn’t be a stretch to consider the Times’ role in the WikiLeaks affair could be a glimpse into how a legacy newsroom could retool itself into an “intelligence agency for the people.”

Consider the following. An intelligence agency has agents who collect information, logistics specialists to move resources, and analysts to make sense of it all and explain it in reports. Newsrooms have reporters who collect information, allocate resources, analyze information and explain it in stories.

The real difference between an intelligence agency and a newsroom (besides rendition, assassination and a few other things) is how they manage data. Intelligence analysts incorporate statistical information, demographic information and input from psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, geologists and essentially any resource a state can muster to understand the nature of the world. The end result is top secret.

The public should be provided these same services. The world is awash in data. What it lacks is understanding. The fourth estate is that it is positioned, more than any other entity, to package that information in the most persistent form to human memory: the narrative. And journalists at the forefront understand that more methods of communication only open as the technology improves: visualizations, interactive maps and charts, multimedia, and eventually, virtual environments.

There’s already been great progress to this end. The Guardian Datastore, Texas Tribune and the Bay Citizen recently won awards for investigating MP expenses, constructing a database of government salaries, and building an app to log bike accidents, respectively.

“Page One” ends with the nytimes.com paywall being erected, with the question about the fate of the Times still lingering. But just as easily it could have ended on an optimistic note, emphasizing this new, data-centric role as a chance of renewal for journalism.

Sources and Resources

Online edition of “The New Precision Journalist” by Philip Meyer.

“What journalists can learn from the scientists and the scientific method,” Matt Thompson on Poynter.org

What improved word clouds reveal in Obama, Bernanke jobs and economy speeches

2011-09-12T15:33:00.000-05:00

The above is a word cloud using President Obama’s Sept. 8 address to Congress. As is customary with word clouds, the more times a word occurs in a text, the larger the font size in the cloud. Even if you weren’t aware of the nature of the speech, it’s obvious from the cloud that Obama’s address to Congress dealt with “jobs” in “America.”

But word clouds have limits. Seth Duncan, analytics director for the digital public relations firm WCG, wrote on the bynd.com blog in 2010 that the simplicity of the word cloud could contribute to a decline of reading comprehension. In his post, “Word Clouds and the Cognitive Decline of PR and Marketing,” Duncan wrote that he strongly believed “that the word cloud is the biggest enemy of deep reading and lowest form of artificial intelligence in marketing and PR.”

“You can read the content very quickly (because they don’t contain much information) and they have a unique look. I also think that word clouds can provide useful information for SEM or SEO planning. But people are fooling themselves if they think that a word cloud offers a satisfactory summary of hundreds or thousands of pages of text,” he wrote.

NYU political science PhD student Drew Conway has a similar, but different beef with word clouds. Conway looked at a word cloud, essential a plot of words in three dimensions (x, y, and font size), and saw a missed opportunity. “They are meant to summarize a single statistics—word frequency—yet they use a two dimensional space to express that,” he wrote.

His solution came from his background in statistics, which oftentimes compares two sets of data. For his improved word cloud, he compared two speeches by political figures and used the x-axis to describe the similarity between two speeches. To accomplish this, he used the free, open-source statistical programming environment R, which has a data-mining and graphics plotting features, along with some custom coding.

But what to compare the Obama jobs speech to? That same day, bankers and business executives at the Economic Club of Minnesota waited eagerly to hear the Fed Chair Ben Bernanke outline what the Fed would do to alleviate economic concerns.

Obama and Bernanke were speaking to two very different audiences, and had different objectives. Obama was speaking to a Congress hell bent on being re-elected and an anxious, under-employed American public. Meanwhile, Bernanke was speaking to titans of industry and banking. These differences shouldn’t be an excuse not to compare the two speeches; rather, both speakers are components of the administration weighing in on essentially the same issue.

Differences in their speeches could signal a difference in opinion and discord about an appropriate response, while similarities could point to ideas with a measure of political support. If nothing else, it’s worth looking at how two high-ranking officials in an administration tailor speeches on economic issues to two different audiences.

Here’s what those two speeches look like in Conway’s “better word cloud.” Click to see the plot in a higher resolution.

The center line represents words used most often by both speakers, while words at either end are spoken more by one person than the other. The size of the font indicates the frequency of the word.

In his speech, Bernanke used “economic,” “recovery” and “fiscal” many more times than did Obama. Those words are adjectives and nouns rather than action verbs, and so they are more characteristic of an analysis than a call to action.

In comparison, Obama used the words “people,” “companies” and “pass” more than Bernanke. Those are nouns with the exception of “pass” – which is an action verb – and Obama used that word 18 times during his speech.

The hypothesis, is that Brenanke’s speech didn’t suggest a call to action, while Obama’s speech did. The litmus test for the effectiveness of this comparison was whether news reports and analysis came to the same conclusion. And indeed, they did.

“Investors were clearly peeved that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke did not bring up a new plan to save the economy in a speech today in Minneapolis, leaving it up to President Obama to inspire the market in a speech unveiling a new jobs plan tonight,” wrote Barron’s.

“Fed chief failed to shed new light on potential policy efforts,” wrote the Dow Jones newswire. “Bernanke reiterated that the central bank stands ready to act and the board will discuss a full range of monetary tools at its Sept. 20-21 meeting, but didn’t commit to any particular tool.”

More insight is gathered from the words that aren’t at the extreme of the spectrum. For example, Obama used strong nouns and verbs such as “action,” “create,” “decided,” “provide,” and “strengthen.” Again, in comparison, Bernanke used the words “continue,” “confidence” and “affected.”

The R statistical program also produced a list of word frequencies in the speeches, which I have converted into a Microsoft Excel table. A Google Docs link for that file is below.

Sources and Resources

Text of Bernanke’s speech

Text of Obama’s speech

Excel table of word frequencies (via Google Docs)

R, a statistical programming environment

Quick R, a how-to blog on the R environment by statistical research methodologist Robert I. Kabacoff, Ph.D.

The Fed Chairman Game, from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Hopelessness and Hope in Pilsen - BATTLE IN THE BARRIO part 4/4

2011-09-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

An anti-Fisk poster hung by activists in a Pilsen Thrift store.

“And every morning was a requiem
or the feast day of a martyr -
the priest in black or red,
cortege of traffic, headlights
funneling through incense
under viaducts. While my surplice
settled around me like smoke
my father rode the blue spark
of a streetcar to the foundry
where, in the dark mornings,
the cracks of carbonized windows
flowed with the blood of stained glass.”

- Excerpt from “Autobiography,” a poem by Stuart Dybek, a Pilsen native and a 2007 recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant.”

NOTE: The following is the last in a series of four stories about the environmental and health impact of coal fired power plants on densely-populated, low income Chicago communities. It's called "Battle in the Barrio: the Struggle in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood Against Pollution." The series is a journalistic project that culminated in a master's thesis for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]
[Visualization: "Pilsen's struggle with pollution"]
[Visualization: "Injustice in Pilsen?"]

If you have the time, Maria Torres has stories.

Since she became a community organizer a decade ago, helping gather signatures for petitions and lately rallying support for the Clean Power Ordinance, she’s collected quite a few.

Mostly, they involve people who’ve suddenly come down with asthma, respiratory illnesses, rare forms of cancer, lupus and other medical abnormalities.

“I have a family that lives right in front of the Perez school,” she said. “Her son was just diagnosed with asthma, and has to use an inhaler. And he’s real little. You feel for them, because they tell you how hard it is for her son to use the inhaler. It’s really hard for him because he’s a little kid and he doesn’t know how to. He just developed it, and didn’t have it before. I feel for them, I really feel for them. And it scares me.”

In addition to the verb “scares,” as in, “it scares me,” and “freaks,” as in “it freaks me out,” she frequently uses the adjectives “spooky” and “weird” to describe the magnitude of health problems she’s heard of while knocking on doors as a community organizer in Pilsen.
There’s the story she heard about an 80-year old woman, who lives on Morgan between 18th and 19th streets, not far from the Fisk plant, and got a routine X-ray for breathing problems.

The doctors asked the woman’s daughter, who took her mother in to be examined, if the mother was a regular smoker.

“She’s never smoked a day in her life,” Torres said. “But her lungs were all black.”

“I had another mother who died of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease),” she recalled, “People are beginning to wonder. I remember ‘blah-blah-blah’ having this and, you know, all these stories are coming up with people’s health and what they’ve had.”

Torres lives in the North Lawndale community, which borders the Pilsen neighborhood on the northwest side, and lately has been an unpaid volunteer for Pilsen Alliance. She’s organized in other communities, but she hasn’t seen the kinds of health problems she’s encountered in Pilsen.

“It’s crazy,” Torres said. “And so many of these residents are young. I’m shocked. I’ve organized other communities, like West Englewood, and I’ve never seen people (sick) at the magnitude I’ve seen here. Back from knocking on doors, I’m freaked out. It really freaks me out. Some families are so sick, it’s unbelievable.”

Leila Mendez, a resident of Pilsen for 40 years, found a lump in her left breast in 1998.
“I scheduled an appointment to get everything looked at,” Mendez said. “They did all of those tests that were necessary and they wanted me to come back in six months, but I said no. I want this mass taken out immediately.”

Mendez said she had made a wise choice – during the operation, doctors discovered that the lump was a phyllodes tumor, an especially rare and aggressive variety of cancer.
“I probably would have died,” she said.

She started to wonder how she got the tumor.

“The doctors were surprised because I didn’t fit the profile. I wasn’t overweight, I hadn’t smoked cigarettes or drank alcohol, and I was very healthy,” Mendez said. “And no breast cancer history in the family. Nothing like that.”

Mendez practiced Adventism, a type of Christianity whose followers practice vegetarianism. And while her diet may not have ultimately prevented her from developing cancer, she attributed it to her being able to survive cancer.

“Advents are well known for their health messages,” she said. “When I turned nine, that’s when my parents converted to Adventism. And so we stopped eating pork, stopped eating certain meats. My father didn’t drink anymore, he didn’t drink coffee. So we were living very healthy.”

She never thought much about the air quality in Pilsen until she started attending PERRO meetings. She began reading medical reports about links between pollution and cancer, and started believing more and more that the cause to her tumor was all around her.

“All of these things are coming out,” she said. “All of my questions were answered.”

One of her sisters has thyroid problems, while another survived thyroid cancer. Mendez’s father came down with emphysema, despite never having smoked. She remembered her mother suffering from allergies, and her sister’s son, who also battled allergies before moving out of Pilsen. And like other Pilsen residents, Mendez had blinding headaches as a child.

“They moved away a year, and he hasn’t suffered since,” she said. “I also attribute that to pollutants.”

The phyllodes tumor wasn’t Mendez’s first brush with death. She remembered looking out a window when her son was five, and watching gangbangers running down the alley. She yelled at her son to duck, which caught the attention of one of the hoodlums.

“And then they pointed one of those big guns that you see on TV at me,” she said. “And they looked at me and I looked at them,” she said.

The gangbanger took his gun off of Mendez and kept running with the rest of his crew.

“That was scary.”

Another vivid memory was the first one she ever had of gang violence in Pilsen. As a child, she witnessed a man being killed, and his body being dumped in a trash can near her home.

“I remember that because I knew the guys who did it,” she said. “But I didn’t say anything to anybody.”

“My goodness, that poor man,” she added.

Yet, Mendez says she feels safer in Pilsen than in other Chicago neighborhoods. She has no intention of leaving, for pollution or for crime.

“I do all of these things and I keep a positive attitude, because I figure if God thinks it’s my time, it’s my time.”

“But in the meantime, I do what I can,” she said.

Besides anecdotes, there’s scant scientific data about what medical troubles affect Pilsen residents. A study of 50,000 Chicago children under the age of 12 revealed that asthma rates were as high as 44 percent to the southeast and northwest of Pilsen, while the prevalence of asthma within Pilsen was about 10 percent.

PERRO’s Jerry Mead-Lucero is concerned that what data that is available, such as maps plotting asthma cases throughout the city, may be inconclusive, or at worst, misleading.

“There’s a number of factors to be considered there. First of all, the pollution that comes from these plants doesn’t just stay right here,” Mead-Lucero said. “Although, the closer you are to the plants, the more likely you’re going to be breathing in the particulate pollution of the plants.”

“Asthma itself is a little of a tricky thing,” he added, “because there’s different things that cause asthma, and a lot of asthma is a genetic issue, right? And so you see certain populations in Chicago have a higher genetic predisposition to asthma.”

There is, however, one recent initiative taken on by City officials to try to quantify the health hazard of pollution in the neighborhoods. Spurred by the EPA results of unhealthy lead levels in the Pilsen community and requests by concerned citizens, along with requests from PERRO and Pilsen Alliance, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) took blood samples of nearly 200 Pilsen residents during free lead screenings in early June.

CDPH responded to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to release the information in late July, but said it was still tabulating data. Organizers await the aggregate results of the lead screening.

One thing that upsets Torres more than the medical conditions in Pilsen is the helplessness that some residents feel about changing their surroundings.

“Pilsen, a lot of people in the community are desensitized, whether it’s because they’ve been invisible for so long, they just don’t know how to attack this issue, or they don’t think they can,” she said. “It’s really sad, and there’s a lot of that in the community. It’s harder than in most communities, and there’s a lot of people who are desensitized. There’s no political representation for them.”


Stuart Dybek, Pilsen native and recipient of the MacArthur "genius grant." Photo from the MacArthur foundation website.

Stuart Dybek, a Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowship recipient, who explored his childhood in Pilsen in his acclaimed short stories, said he was aware and worried about the issues in his hometown.

“Articles about the local environment have of course caught my attention and concern about the generation growing up there now,” Dybek wrote in a July email, while teaching writing courses in Prague.

Dybek, who was born in 1942, grew up in Pilsen at a time when it had a larger Czech and Polish constituency. It is believed that the neighborhood’s name, Pilsen, was derived from the city of Plzeň in the Czech Republic, although a town named Pilzno also exists in Poland.

One spot of hope has been the Clean Power ordinance, which proponents hope will force Midwest Generation to greatly curb emissions or shut the Crawford and Fisk stations down.

The ordinance requires power plants to limit particulate matter under 10 micrometers to 0.015 pounds per million BTU of heat input in any one hour period. The requirement represents a 90 percent reduction from the current EPA requirements.

Additionally, the ordinance sets a requirement for PM 2.5, which are particulate matter measuring less than 2.5 micrometers. The EPA currently has no limit of PM 2.5 emissions, whereas the ordinance requires a limit of 0.010 pounds per million BTU per hour.

“Studies… have shown that there is no safe threshold level for PM or PM 2.5 and there are mortalities and health effects at every level of exposure,” the ordinance is written.

The ordinance would effectively force Midwest Generation to convert the plant into a natural gas facility, or shut it down altogether.

“You would have to stop producing from coal and become a natural gas plant,” said Susan Olavarria, spokesperson and communications director for Midwest Generation.

Midwest Generation officials said converting the plant is no small task, and would require years to complete, as well as a “major, major monetary investment.” And then after the transition is complete, Olavarria said, there are no guarantees that the plant could be profitable. Natural gas, while it reduces emissions down to the requirements of the ordinance, is more expensive than coal, and the power generated from it would be more expensive as well.

More expensive electricity on the market is less marketable, unless the city included in the ordinance a requirement that it buy a share of Fisk and Crawford’s new, cleaner energy.

“It’s obviously a more expensive form of power,” she said. “We are saying we would be happy to become a natural gas plant if the city would be willing to give us a purchase agreement to purchase power from it. Then we’d be happy to do it.”

Another matter is the jobs at stake in the transition.

“The crews and people that have to work in it are not the same employees that work in it now,” Olavarra said. “It takes a different kind of skill set and training to do that.”

Mead-Lucero said he is working on a solution to ensure the workers of the Fisk plant, who are mostly union workers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 15, have a place to work after such a transition. He hopes an amendment can be added to the ordinance which would start a program to retrain the IBEW 15 workers for green jobs.

“We all feel very strongly, particularly in PERRO, but also in the broader coalition as well, there’s a very strong sentiment that we have to come up with a solution to what happens to these workers,” he said. “We’re not going to be happy with these plants shutting down and these workers being left without jobs.”

“So my thought is let’s try to get the unions to say, let’s think about this in the long term,” Mead-Lucero said. “Do you guys want to figure out a way that you workers are going to make sure that they’re ok regardless what happens, regardless what the company decides if we’re going to go with these plans. Or are you just going to stick it out in the short term and just cross your fingers and hope they don’t screw you in the end in 2015 or 2018 or whenever they’re going to do this.”

Although support for the ordinance has resulted in a coalition of 56 organizations, including PERRO, Sierra Club and Pilsen Alliance, and 26 aldermen as cosponsors, delays by the City Council meant the legislation expired along with the 2010 term.

The coalition is optimistic about its prospects this time around, largely due to a mayor that it says is more supportive of this kind of ordinance.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

“[Mayor Daley] never wanted to deal with these two plants. He had various initiatives with planters and trees around the neighborhood, and that kind of thing, but when it came to the issue of what to do with the Fisk and Crawford power plants, he was always silent and then behind the scenes, basically working against,” Mead-Lucero said.

“The change now with Rahm Emanuel, I think it’s a very big change actually. He has repeatedly said in one form or another that he recognized it as a problem. He’s not been willing to come out strongly and say he supports the ordinance, and that’s what we’re trying to do now. I think that’s possible.”

The latest from Emanuel’s office, however, indicates the Chicago Clean Power Coalition may not have it so easy in the coming months.

“The administration is currently reviewing options for ensuring that Midwest Generation cleans up Fisk & Crawford or converts the plants to a cleaner fuel. The Clean Power Ordinance may not achieve the quickest clean-up because of the likelihood that the ordinance will spark a long, drawn-out legal battle,” Emanuel’s press office replied in an email statement.

“The Mayor is committed to working with state and federal regulators and the city council to make sure those plants are addressed in the quickest, most effective manner possible.”

South-side children have greatest exposure to lead in Chicago, health department data shows

2011-09-08T12:43:00.000-05:00

This interactive heat map, compiled using Chicago Department of Public Health data, GIS files, and Google Fusion, shows where Children with the highest rates elevated blood lead levels in Chicago live. Data is from 2010.

Chicago Department of Public Health data shows that children in the poorer, industrialized south of Chicago are more likely to have dangerous levels of lead in their bodies than children in more affluent neighborhoods.

The data, obtained by a FOIA request from the health department, shows the levels of lead the agency found in children 17 and under in the city of Chicago. Most children tested for lead, however, were under 6 years old.

“An EBL or elevated blood lead level, is defined… as the child’s highest venous test with a result of 6 or more micrograms lead (Pb) per deciliter blood,” the health department wrote.

According to the EPA, there is no safe level for lead in the human bloodstream. At 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood, children can develop symptoms such as “lowered intelligence, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention span, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior.”

The most recent results are from 2010, but the file contains annual results back to 2005. They were compiled with the help of an epidemiologist in the department.

“Multiple blood lead tests were determined using an algorithm that matches children by name, date of birth and sex, while allowing for common typographical and data entry (eg, reversing first and last name) errors for blood lead tests conducted within a calendar year,” the health department wrote.

In the interactive heat map at the top of the post shows the rate at which children in each of Chicago’s 77 communities reported elevated levels of lead.

The Englewood community has the highest EBL rate, where 9.15 percent of the children who were tested for lead came back with a positive EBL. Neighborhoods in the north end of Chicago had EBL rates between 0.8 percent and 3.31 percent.

The original FOIA request was for results from blood lead tests in the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods. Residents there are concerned about lead pollution from the H. Kramer foundry, which violated federal lead emissions regulations this year and in 2005.

In March, the Pilsen neighborhood was declared a nonattainment area for lead by the EPA. It was then that citizens lobbied the health department to conduct free lead screenings in the community. The neighborhood’s struggle with pollution and health concerns is documented in a four-part series called “Battle in the Barrio.”

However, citing privacy concerns, the health department would not release the results of their blood tests, which were administered June 11 and 12. In lieu of the data, the health department provided results for children’s blood screenings across Chicago.

There’s a strong visual correlation between the map of EBL rates in south-side Chicago communities, and a maps showing increased toxic emissions in those same areas. A 2007 report on toxic releases in Chicago by the Medill School of Journalism showed some of the highest concentration of pollution in Chicago’s south and west sides.

Additionally, the geographic areas with high EBL rates also happen to be where children are most likely to develop asthma. A 2008 study showed that the likelihood of a child developing asthma depends a great deal on the neighborhood that child grows up in. According to researchers, children are especially susceptible to asthma if they grow up in an impoverished neighborhood.

Visualization - is there injustice in Pilsen?

2011-09-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

This visualization was produced as part of a series about Pilsen, a Chicago neighborhood, and its struggle against pollution. Parts one, two and three of that series have been published on MentalMunition.com.

The People VS the Bottom Line - BATTLE IN THE BARRIO part 3/4

2011-09-06T20:00:00.000-05:00

“Decisions regarding whether or not to proceed with the above projects or other approaches to compliance remain subject to a number of factors, such as market conditions, regulatory and legislative developments, and forecasted commodity prices and capital and operating costs applicable at the time decisions are required or made… Due to existing uncertainties about these factors, Midwest Generation intends to defer final decisions about particular units for the maximum time available.”

- Excerpt from page 92 of Midwest Generation’s 2010 report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, form 10K.

NOTE: The following is the third installment in a series of four stories about the environmental and health impact of coal-fired power plants on densely-populated, low income Chicago communities. It's called "Battle in the Barrio: the Struggle in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood Against Pollution." Part one, "Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder," is available here. Part two, "Old Problems, New Attention" is available here. A visualization describing Pilsen's struggle with pollution is here.

In a dimly-lit space in the back of a Pilsen café known for its fruit smoothies, a dozen Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO) activists and organizers huddled over coffees and discussed upcoming plans for an annual community festival, Fiesta del Sol.

A Pilsen tradition for the last 39 years, Fiesta del Sol is an event featuring local art vendors, Mexican food, carnival rides, soccer games, and a chance for local organizations to boost donations and deliver information to the public.

This year, as in years past, Midwest Generation was one of the lead corporate sponsors for the event, and included among a group of sponsors under the banner “Pilsen Neighborhood Community Counts.”

“Let me just say one thing,” Jerry Mead-Lucero said. “There was some discussion about whether we should do something at the Fiesta because of the whole connection with Midwest generation. What I’ve been suggesting is I don’t want to completely piss off Pilsen Neighbors about having a booth there, so I’m not recommending we do something like a direct action in a Fiesta.”

“But what I think we are talking about doing stenciling with anti-pollution slogans, so that everyone coming into the fiesta is basically going to have to walk past this anti-pollution slogan as they’re going into the fiesta,” he said. “There were some ideas about a protest; I think that’s a bit much.”

After Mead-Lucero finished, Dorian Breuer, one of PERRO’s original founders, noted that the meeting had gone an hour past its scheduled time. The café staff were mopping up and placing chairs on tables.

“What my understanding was our whole focus was on new members, new people, to almost have an open discussion about what are people’s concerns, what do they want to talk about, and not really about PERRO stuff,” Breuer said.

Sara Trowbridge, a PERRO volunteer, wasn’t sure if that was how they had planned to go about their monthly meetings.

“I thought our general meetings were to report facts,” she said.

“What happened though was, a new person might show up and listen for two hours,” Breuer said. “That’s what was happening. And we had two people here and they left.”

PERRO had formed in 2004, but was still perfecting its method of conducting public, monthly meetings where people could both voice their concerns and learn more about the group. Its purpose, however, was well established.

“PERRO believes all people have the right to live in a clean and healthy environment, regardless of their race and class,” the PERRO website, pilsenperro.org, stated. “Its mission is to spread awareness about this concept of environmental justice and make Pilsen a healthier place to live, work, and raise children.”

Ask Pilsen resident Mead-Lucero what “environmental justice” is, and you’ll get an answer like this: “Obviously at the root of it is a concern about environmental problems or contamination or pollution. That’s definitely the key area of all of this.”

“But it’s definitely broader than that,” he said.

The long answer, Mead-Lucero said, is that certain communities are impacted by environmental problems more than others, especially low-income, minority neighborhoods.

“And there’s a reason for that,” Mead-Lucero said. “It’s related to issues of institutional racism, it’s related to issues of just historic ways these issues develop.”

Despite comprising 13 percent of the U.S. population, more than seven out of 10 Latinos in America lived in counties that violated federal pollution standards in 2002, according to a report by the League of United Latin American Citizens. According to the 2010 census, 82 percent of Pilsen’s 35,769 residents consider themselves Hispanic.

That demographic, along with the fact that the neighborhood has been traditionally working-class, low-wage earners puts Pilsen at a political disadvantage, Mead-Lucero said. Eighteen percent of Pilsen households use food stamps, and thirty percent of residents live in poverty, according to the 2009 American Community Survey.

Combine that with the fact that since Fisk’s construction in 1903, urban sprawl has turned the neighborhood from dominantly industrial to a mix of industrial and residential, and you have the elements of the pollution problem today.

“The Fisk plant had been there for 100 years now largely because there isn’t the political will or the pressure to do anything about it because it’s not a neighborhood that has a great deal of political power or influence, as compared to wealthier, white neighborhoods in the north side,” he said.

“We were talking about communities that are already marginalized because of income, because of race, because of immigration status,” he added. “There’s this problem, then, that those communities are suffering more with more environmental contamination than other communities. To address these issues, we also have to address other issues like political disempowerment, economic disempowerment, and so on.”

He pointed to the example of A. Finkle & Sons, a foundry that makes moldings for American and foreign car manufactures, which had been located on the north side of Chicago, near the Lincoln Park neighborhood, for more than 100 years. That was, until political pressure from residents forced it to move to another location in 2009.

In2004, the Clean Air Task Force released study, which used the peer-reviewedmethodology approved by the National Science Foundation and used by the EPA,that demonstrated the two plants contributed to 42 deaths annually.

“Those who look up Cook County will see it ranked worst in the nation for dangerous air pollution, based on 2005 data. The Tribune also found Chicago was among the 10 worst cities in the U.S.” wrote the Chicago Tribune in 2008. “The factory with the highest risk score in Chicago is a steel mill on the edge of upscale Lincoln Park, a neighborhood where it isn't uncommon to find people buying organic dog food.”

Incidentally, the new Finkle & Sons foundry is located on the impoverished south side of the city.

“From the early ‘70s until 2000, the small, predominantly African-American neighborhood on the far South Side was home to a number of manufacturing industries, including a detergent factory and Jay’s Potato Chips plant. But in recent times Burnside residents have seen these companies close or move away, taking the middle-class jobs that once defined their community with them,” wrote Chicago Weekly in 2009.

“In light of the neighborhood’s depressed economic situation, it is no surprise that A. Finkl & Sons met a warm reception when it announced it would relocate to Burnside after considering several other sites outside Chicago.”

On Monday mornings, Mead-Lucero can be heard on Labor Express Radio, a one-hour radio program focused on local, national and international current events and labor issues. It’s broadcasted from WLUW, the radio station of Loyola University.

“It’s not just news about strikes or the unions,” he said. “It’s pretty broad, and about issues facing working people. So economy, jobs, housing, immigration, all kinds of issues that we are dealing with on the program.”

The rest of his time is divided between a job hunt (Mead-Lucero lost a teaching job in June 2010) and leading PERRO. Like his radio show, PERRO’s goals are similarly broad.

“We’re an environmental justice organization, so our vision isn’t simply the issue of various polluters or environmental contamination. Environmental issues are part of social and economic issues in a broader sense. We’re concerned about gentrification in the neighborhood, that’s a big issue, people are getting pushed out because of the rising property values and rent and so on,” he said.

A large part of the social injustice, according to Mead-Lucero and other community organizers, is that local residents receive none of the monetary benefits of the generating station, yet receive the brunt of the environmental costs of the plant – what an economist might call an “externalities.”

Midwest Generation receives the coal for all of its seven coal power plants from southern Wyoming mines, a shipment which varies between 17.5 million to 19.5 million tons a year, according to its annual 10K filings with the SEC.

But once the coal is sent to Fisk and Crawford to be burned, the energy is sold on the open market. The largest purchasers of the plant’s electricity are utility companies in the eastern part of the country, including Ohio and Pennsylvania.

For this, and the rest of its utilities, Midwest Generation posted a net income of $215 million off total revenue of $1.47 billion in 2010.

Corporate factsheets about the plants state the plants contribute $2.5 million in property taxes to the city, and that Midwest Generation donates profits to the Pilsen YMCA, local festivals and other charitable organizations, Mead-Lucero said it simply doesn’t make up for the toll to his community.

The scientific research supports his opinion.

Since a 2002 Harvard study that demonstrated the two plants contributed to 41 premature deaths annually, ELPC estimated that Chicago residents have had to shoulder approximately $750 million to $1 billion in healthcare costs because of the plants’ deleterious effects. Every year that passes, residents have to suffer another $127 million or more in damages, the organization said.

Lavey testifying before the Chicago City Council in Februrary on
the city's proposed clean power ordinance.

“I’m going to talk about money,” Warren Lavey, senior law fellow at the ELPC, testified before the Chicago City Council, during a February 14, 2011 hearing on the clean power ordinance.

“Money. Do I have your attention?”

During his testimony, Lavey cited a U.S. EPA finding that bringing old power plants into compliance would yield a health benefit of 50 to 100 times the cost of installing pollution controls.

Lavey wasn’t involved in the 2002 Harvard study, but ELPC heavily cited the study in its testimony and in its press releases.

Midwest Generation disagrees with the Harvard study, which it said used outdated statistics.

“The data for this study were gathered nearly a dozen years ago, before Midwest generation even owned these plants,” wrote the company on fiskandcrawford.com, a website promoting the power plants. “Its conclusions are completely outdated, and it fails to take into account the substantial emissions reductions over the past decade by Midwest Generation – both voluntary and mandated by the U.S. EPA and the State of Illinois. This old study should have no bearing on the current debate, even though those who want the plants shut down continue to use it as a political tool.”

Susan Olavarria, spokesperson and director of communications at Midwest Generation, said in a telephone interview that its power plants were not only compliant with U.S. EPA law, but also the stricter Illinois EPA regulations.

“Illinois basically leads the nation, with some of the most aggressive regulations and requirements in the country, of any coal plant. It’s why when we met with the Illinois EPA as part of that requirement that was given to us in 2006, we began working on that work and were one of the first in the country to install the first mercury controls ever. We did that work back in 2008. The Obama administration, the U.S. EPA, just issued those mercury rules in March, and we already meet them. And that’s only because, again, because Illinois has been pretty aggressive on this very issue,” Olavarria said.

“Nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide reductions, also again, part of our agreement with the state of Illinois, is something that the USEPA issued just a couple weeks ago. And we were already on pace to meeting those requirements as well, again, because of the aggressive Illinois EPA rules and requirements for us to meet these standards sooner. We’re on par to meet nitrogen oxide reduction requirements for 2012, and will also be meeting the sulfur dioxide control requirements,” she said.

But more recent research doesn’t show the death toll from Fisk and Crawford decreasing. In 2004, the Clean Air Task Force released study, which used the peer-reviewed methodology approved by the National Science Foundation and used by the EPA, that demonstrated the two plants contributed to 42 deaths annually. Meanwhile, Cook County as a whole suffered 120 premature deaths from those and other coal-fired power plants nearby.

Mead-Lucero wasn’t content with relying on those reports, and instead embarked on a fact-finding mission that would change the dynamic between the polluters and Pilsen permanently.

Fisk isn’t the only point source contributing to pollution in the neighborhood. While the Fisk station emitted about 149 pounds of lead in 2009, that same year, H. Kramer, a smelter also located in Pilsen, dumped 242 pounds of the material. In 2005, PERRO members began testing the soil in Pilsen and around the H. Kramer plant by sending samples to the Illinois EPA.

“One of the samples that was collected right next to the plant had something like 92 times what was considered a safe level of lead in the soil,” Mead-Lucero recalled. “And so it was very disconcerting stuff. So we took that to the EPA, and spurred them to do their own testing.”

The IEPA’s testing resulted in a $10,000 fine for the company in 2006, and forced H. Kramer to install $500,000 in pollution control equipment.

When the state of Illinois announced that it would place additional air quality monitors at more than a dozen locations across the state in 2010, PERRO lobbied to have one located near the H. Kramer plant.

After some “back and forth,” Mead-Lucero said, the IEPA chose to monitor Pilsen’s air from the top of Perez elementary school – a fine arts magnet school located a tenth of a mile from the H. Kramer plant and about half of a mile from the Fisk station. More than 99 percent of the school’s 404 students are from low-income families, and 98 percent are Hispanic, according to data from Chicago Public Schools.

It then disappointed, but didn’t surprise, Mead-Lucero when those air monitors recorded high enough lead levels for the EPA to declare part of the Pilsen neighborhood a “nonattainment” zone for lead.

“Even at low levels, exposure to lead can impair a child’s IQ, learning capabilities and memory,” the EPA wrote in a press release. “Although airborne lead levels have dropped dramatically in the United States since the transition to unleaded gas, the latest science indicates the stronger standards are necessary to protect children.”

The EPA specifically singled out H. Kramer as the source of the lead pollution, and has ordered the smelter to reduce lead levels to acceptable levels by 2013.

It was a small victory for the neighborhood, but many more obstacles still stand in the way. In the meantime, PERRO and other community organizations are continuing to put pressure on Midwest Generation to reduce emissions of particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxides and other pollutants from the Fisk and Crawford plants.

Visualization - Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood struggles with pollution

2011-09-01T11:00:00.002-05:00

The Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago faces unique challenges in terms of environment and health. It retains some of its manufacturing base from when it was an industrial center for Chicago, yet it is primarily residential and now houses a large Latino population. The combination of a dense population and high emissions mean that pollution for the neighborhood is a major concern, as the above visualization demonstrates.

This visualization is part of the series "The Battle in the Barrio: The Struggle in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood Against Pollution." Part one, "Four sisters, one rare disorder," is here. And part two, "Old problems, new attention," is here.

Old Problems, New Attention - BATTLE IN THE BARRIO part 2/4

2011-08-31T11:00:00.003-05:00

The Fisk Generating Station, Pilsen, Chicago.

“I have a hard time believing if these plants were located on the north side of the city, that they would not have already been cleaned up by now.”
- Rev. Patrick Daymond, Sixth Grace Presbyterian Church, in testimony before the Chicago City Council, during hearings on the Clean Power Ordinance.

NOTE: The following is the second of a series of four stories about the environmental and health impact of coal fired power plants on densely-populated, low income Chicago communities. You can read part one, "Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder," here. More parts of this series, along with visualizations and some interactive elements, will be posted in the coming weeks.

They come in at the same time every day.

The lumbering train pulls more than 100 of them, each full with black coal rocks, up to the Will County Generation Station, where the contents are unloaded, mixed, and put on several barges and sent up river.

The barges meander up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship canal, where they dock alongside the Crawford and Fisk coal-fired power plants.

The plants are owned by Midwest Generation, a Delaware limited liability company, solely owned by Edison Mission Midwest Holdings. In turn, Edison Mission Midwest Holdings is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Midwest Generation, EME, LLC. That limited liability company, in turn, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Edison International.
According to Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, Midwest Generation was “formed for the purpose of owning or leasing, making improvements to, and operating and selling the capacity and energy of, the power generation assets it purchased from Commonwealth Edison, which are referred to as the Illinois Plants.”

At the plants, the barges are relieved of their burden and go back down the canal as empty shells. But the coal – that gets turned into electricity. The Fisk and Crawford plants, located in the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods on the lower west side of Chicago, respectively, together generate about 858 megawatts of power.

It’s also turned into pollution. The plants released 3,372 tons of nitrogen oxides, 1,583 tons of soot, and 5 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2008, by the EPA’s count.

On May 24, things did not go as planned at the Crawford and Fisk plants.

“That smokestack’s been spewing for a long time. So, it’s about time for an especially dramatic reminder.”

Before the sun rose on that day, eight people donned respirators, rappelling harnesses and cold-weather gear, and began climbing the 450-foot stack of the Fisk Generating Station. When they reached the maintenance platforms near the top, they unfurled a yellow banner with black letters reading “QUIT COAL.”

“We made it,” activist Kelly Mitchell said into her video camera from the top of the stack in the morning, which Greenpeace posted on YouTube after the protest. “There are now quite a few police on the scene as well, as well workers. But spirits are good here, and energy is high and we’re going to continue our work to get out the message that Edison International needs to shut down these two plants.”
Meanwhile, another team of Greenpeace activists rappelled from a nearby bridge that the Crawford coal barge passes beneath. Dangling from ropes beneath the trusses, those activists let loose another banner of their own: “WE CAN STOP COAL / NOSOTROS PODEMOS PARAR EL CARBON.”

The three activists on the bridge completed their secondary objective by delaying three coal barges destined for Crawford. “The presence of the activists prevented the coal barge from passing,” A blogger on the Greenpeace website wrote. At the same time, activists at Fisk rappelled down the stack and began painting large, block letters in orange: “QUIT COAL.” A WGN news helicopter hovered above the scene, and Chicago police milled below, waiting for the protesters to come down on their own, rather than to risk a dangerous arrest on the stack.

All the media-ready activism was carefully orchestrated. At the same time, at a Crowne Plaza hotel in the West Loop, representatives from the Sierra Club, Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC), Physicians for Social Responsibility, and representatives of the coal industry waited to give testimony to the EPA. Greenpeace made sure their demonstration coincided with the day-long EPA hearings as to bring attention to pollution – at Fisk, Crawford, and the 532 other coal-fired power plants in the United States.

The EPA also was aware of the magnitude of the issue. “Toxic air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants cause serious health impacts,” the agency wrote in an announcement about the hearing. “Mercury can harm children’s developing brains, including effects on memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills. Other toxic metals such as arsenic, chromium and nickel can cause cancer.”

As the activists went to work, members of the Pilsen community gathered across the street from the plant for interviews with the press. Some held signs printed by the Sierra Club that read “Protect our Children / No Toxic Mercury.” Above them, the activists demanded that Midwest Generation officials meet with them. But when that didn’t happen, they announced that they would be staying the night on the stack. When the sun went down, Pilsen residents lit candles and prepared to stay the night as well. All of it was recorded by a mix of professional news crews, environmental activists and Pilsen residents, and posted online.

The Greenpeace activists ended up returning to earth in the morning, after being on the Fisk smokestack for 26 hours, and were immediately arrested. But, “The demand that Edison International close down Fisk and Crawford coal plants continues,” Greenpeace wrote on its website.

The activists may not have been able to stop the plants from operating, but they did succeed in one major way: by putting the Fisk and Crawford power plants on the national stage.

“That smokestack’s been spewing for a long time. So, it’s about time for an especially dramatic reminder,” said CBS’ Walter Jacobson, the anchor of the WBBM 6 p.m. newscast. “Meantime, here’s hoping for better weather so those people can climb back up the smokestack to make sure that Fisk keeps working at it.”

“Right now, there’s a big battle in the Chicago area.”

A BusinessWeek commentary in the June 4 magazine singled out the Fisk and Crawford specifically as reasons for tougher regulation of coal plants. “Living in Pilsen provides a time-travel experience to an era when the air in American cities was grittier and more dangerous,” Paul M. Barrett, assistant managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, wrote.

The Greenpeace “direct action,” as the activists call it, required a high degree of technical skill and expertise. Protesters flew from as far as California and New York to arrive to the Chicago plants.

“I’m actually a full supporter and member of an international group of crazy-ass people who do this kind of work much more frequently than I do,” said John Watterberg, an activist who Greenpeace tapped for the Chicago demonstration, in a 2008 interview with a local Brooklyn magazine. “I’m more of a sleeper cell who comes through whenever they need someone to work around a crazy schedule.”

Watterberg was a veteran at this kind of high-risk endeavor. In 2005, he became part of the “smokestack six,” when he scaled a 700-foot smokestack The Hatfield’s Ferry Power Station in Masontown, Penn., and helped deploy a banner condemning the George W. Bush administration for dropping a Clean Air Act (CAA) investigation of the plant. “The Bush energy plan kills,” the banner read, which featured a cartoon skull and crossbones sporting a cowboy hat with the letter “W.”

For the demonstration at Fisk, the eight protestors were charged with a misdemeanor for trespassing and a felony for criminal damage to property. Most were let go on $15,000 bail. But for his lengthy history of civil disobedience, Watterberg had to post $30,000 for bail.

Watterberg did not respond to emails requesting interviews. Likewise, Greenpeace representatives did not agree to an interview, citing legal concerns about ongoing cases.

“They’re pretty tight lipped, they don’t really share a lot about those kinds of things,” said Jerry Mead-Lucero, an activist and leader of the community group PERRO, the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization, which is also engaged in efforts to curb emissions at Fisk.

“We think it’s great, basically. We weren’t involved ourselves, and that action was a Greenpeace action. We work with Greenpeace on the coalition that's trying to get the clean power ordinance passed. And we knew they were planning something, although we really didn't know what the action was going to be. They had said, we’re going to do an action in Chicago, do you think that would be a good thing or not?” he said.

One of PERRO’s chief efforts as of late is to rally support behind a Chicago city ordinance that would force the plants to permanently slash their emissions.
“There’s different ways to go about these issues. PERRO is focused on organizing, educating, mobilizing people in the neighborhood to get the ordinance passed and other stuff.” Mead-Lucero said.

“We’ve certainly done a lot of rallies and things like that, more than civil disobedience or direct action kind of stuff. It definitely highlights what’s going on to highlight the issue. They were getting the message out there. They painted a message on that smokestack which was exactly true, which was, that coal hurts people in the community.”

Fisk and Crawford were large targets for two primary reasons. One was that the plants were located in densely-populated areas, where a large number working-class, minority families lived.

Another was that these plants were some of the oldest and dirtiest plants in the country, according to the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC). “Midwest Generation has largely failed to install modern pollution controls on these coal plants,” the nonprofit environmental advocacy organization wrote in October 2010. “They emit far more pollution than newer coal plants that meet the federal air quality standards designed to protect public health.”

Perhaps ironically, the age of the plants saved them from federal regulations in the 1970s. The Clean Air Act amendment of 1977 set stricter rules for planned coal plants, yet grandfathered in some 200 existing coal plants, with the intention that those plants would eventually be phased out, ELPC wrote.

But for its day, Fisk was state-of-the-art. “Here the large turbo-generator units which have revolutionized the methods of generating electricity had their first trial,” wrote Samuel Insull in 1915, the electric utility and railroad magnate, who went on to fund the construction of the historic Chicago Civic Opera House in 1929. “This was the first electric generating station in the world to be equipped exclusively with steam-turbine generating units, and it became famous.”

Fisk was first built in 1903, and then upgraded with the current working generation unit in 1959. Meanwhile, Crawford’s generation units date back to 1959 and 1961.

Increasingly, the concern among environmental activists is that these plants will continue to skirt under local, state and federal pollution legislation. And as such, they’re choosing to target individual plants that have proven to be habitual polluters, like Fisk and Crawford.

“Right now, there’s a big battle in the Chicago area,” said Will Reynolds, chair of the Illinois Chapter of the Sierra Club, in an interview from Springfield, Ill. “I would expect that to be the next big phase of the coal campaign and the groups working on coal issues is target some of the older, higher-polluting plants and try to get companies to shut those down.”

Upheavals, earthquakes, and my social media experience on Al Jazeera English

2011-08-24T20:40:00.000-05:00

It almost didn’t happen. I was due to be a part of a discussion on Al Jazeera English (AJE), the international news channel, about the end of Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year reign in Libya.

A half-hour before show time, I receive the following email in my inbox from a producer:

“We had an earthquake and all over the city people are standing outside their buildings,” the producer wrote. “I’m guessing we won’t get back in in time for today’s show. Perhaps we’ll shift our schedule to do it tomorrow, or another day.”

A quick look on the USGS website revealed a 5.9 earthquake had struck Virginia, shaking buildings in D.C. and New York. The Stream, the cutting-edge AJE news program that blends new and traditional media, might miss the historic event in Libya.

First, some background.

Al Jazeera English is an international news channel that is broadcast worldwide from Doha, London and Washington D.C., to an estimated audience of 150 million viewers in 100 countries.

Being headquartered in the East, Al Jazeera was uniquely positioned to report on the Arab Spring uprisings. Indeed, it capitalized on this major news event, and the AJE internet stream gained more than 1.6 million American viewers during the first months of the revolt.

The White House also took notice, and included AJE in its diet of international events coverage. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took notice of the network, and in a briefing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, praised the quality of reporting on the international channel.

“You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners,” she said.

Perhaps no other AJE program has gained as much momentum during the Arab Spring as the new media experiment The Stream.

Broadcast daily from Monday through Thursday from the Washington D.C. studio, the Stream hosts a panel of two to three guests who have some kind of stake in a major news event. But that’s where the similarities between this and other current events programs end.

The host for the program, Hoops Prize-winning Derrick Ashong, plays a dual-role as a moderator of comments and questions streaming in from the web. He also scouts social networks and presents blog posts, Tweets, photos, and on-the-ground reports that have relevance to the news of the day.

Regularly, the news of the day is about the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.

"The Show Must Go On"

Technical bugs happen frequently on this live show. Guests joining via Skype can get cut off. Networks can lag and crash. But the host rolls with it, and has guests elaborate on points or raises other questions. This is the cost of experimentation, and the show’s ingenuity pays off dividends.

That success should come as no surprise considering the nature of the Uprising. Social media played a critical role in the Arab Spring, providing a means of coordination, information exchange and expression. And the Stream was in position capitalize on the flood of firsthand accounts coming from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and countries across the Arab region.

So when rebel forces liberated Tripoli this week, I knew I wanted to be a part of the conversation at the media epicenter. I responded to a status update on The Stream’s Facebook Page, and shortly thereafter I received an email and Google+ invite from Ben Connors, a web producer for the show.

Then, the quake happened, delaying the show. But the earthquake turned out not to be as big of an event as the social media world seemed to make it. John McKinley (@jmckinley) posted a photo of an overturned lawn chair, along with a facetious comment: “Thanks to all of you for your kind words of support, as we look to recover from the devastation of today's quake!”

“The show must go on,” Connors emails me. “We’re going to give it a shot.”

While The Stream uses Skype to connect to key sources and guests, earlier this month, it started implementing Google+ hangouts to allow participation from users and audience members. Connors sent me a link to the hangout, and I logged in during the show’s hasty rehearsal.

For the fall of Libya, Ashong was hosting Taimur Aziz, a social media adviser with Libya’s interim government, the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC). Live in the studio was Najla Abdurrahman, a Libyan-American writer and activist, and Jason Pack, a researcher and Libya analyst from Oxford.

“Now that the government is on the verge of collapse, what does the country’s future look like?” Ashong asked rhetorically at the beginning of The Stream. “Libya is a mix of tribes with varied interests and allegiances.”

Ashong displayed color-coded map of Libya divided into classical tribal and ethnic regions, and asked Abdurrahman, “How realistic is it that will it be that Libya will hold together as a unified nation?”

In covering the revolution in Libya and packaging those events for western audiences, the news media borrowed a motif that it drew from other civil wars in the Middle East. The west’s presumption was that archaic tribal relations devolved into power grabs and civil wars after American forces dissolved the central governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Libya had tribes as well, so the western media’s theory went, then there would also be civil war.

With the Gaddafi regime ended, the words “power vacuum” had begun cropping up in western reports from Libya. A New York Times article on the subject quoted experts and officials who believed that a civil war was all but inevitable.

Experts on The Stream, however, had a different forecast.

“I’ve always taken the position that the importance of tribal affiliation in Libyan society has been exaggerated not only by the regime but also by the western press and analysts, becoming a cliché,” she answered.

Pack said he mostly agreed with her, but said that groups within Libya have their own interests. “There is no desire for separatism,” he said. “Groups are going to work it out.”

What's the Proper Role for the Global Community?

Meanwhile, in the Google hangout, I typed Connors a question to send to the guests. Was the Transnational government up to the task of rebuilding the country?

He said the question was too broad, which was probably correct. But it also may have been moot, because seemed that the guests had partially answered the question. By saying there was no chance for separatism, the panel was implying that the Transnational government could find cooperation across political lines to ensure order in the new Libya.

The host kept the conversation moving. As Ashong brought attention to several twitter posts critiquing western intervention in Libya, the topic shifted. Some twitter posts that The Stream chose to air questions about whether NATO intervention was an imperialistic scheme to capture Libya’s oil reserves.

“The Libyan people... want to respect foreign contracts, they want direct investment and oil technitians getting there as soon as possible because that's their patrimony,” Pack said. “The idea of imperialism, where I come and I take from you, is kind of a zero-sum view of things, kind of like a Gaddafian philosophy.”

The host then jumped in and made it clear that he didn’t want the topic of imperialism to be out-of-bounds for the show. “We want to be careful to think that at this day and age that colonialism does not exist, because we see parts of the world where people believe that colonialism does not exist,” he said.

Aziz, the Transnational media specialist who had a stake in whether his government was perceived as a NATO proxy, defended the revolution as a grassroots movement.

“We started the revolution, not NATO,” he said. “Even if NATO didn’t come to Libya, we would have continued this.”

While this conversation was unfolding, the group of four audience members in the Google+ hangout (myself included), started to chat about what the proper role is for NATO at this point. That’s when Connors tapped me to go on air and ask a question on that topic, about thirteen minutes into the show.

“Yes, it seems like a delicate balance between providing a humanitarian effort and also not going beyond your bounds to establish that imperialism,” I asked, my voice lagging several seconds after the video stream from my home office in Urbana, IL.

“So what is the proper role for the global community to support Libya but not go beyond their bounds?”

“The proper role is to monitor,” Naja answered. “I think that a role is really for the Libyan people themselves, but I hope that the international community continues to take an interest in Libya even after Gaddafi leaves.”

“My concern in the coming weeks and months is how the NTC is doing its job,” she continued. “Are they allowing not only for an open, transparent and inclusive process, a representative political process, but are they also on the flipside allowing for the emergence of a robust civil society... Are they going to allow a free press, are they going to allow the labor unions to be strong again and people to organize?”

Rolling With the Punches

The panel then, actually, started discussing the capabilities of the NTC, and whether it was up to the task of governing Libya.

“Do you have the infrastructure you need to credibly govern the nation?” Ashong asked Aziz.

“Right now we are even in the last months of the Gaddafi regime, there was a big plan for developing the infrastructure of the country,” Aziz said, and referred to a multi-billion dollar contract that was signed between the NTC and international infrastructure developer AECOM.

“There’s no real infrastructure in Libya, everything is destroyed by Gadaffi,” he added. “After the revolution, we're going to rebuild the country from scratch.”

Several times during the show, the Skype connection to Aziz broke. But between the collateral damage, Gaddafi scorching the earth on his way out, and the costly results of NATO strikes, Aziz’s observations made it remarkable that there could be an interview at all. Libya just had its internet connection restored the day before, albeit with periodic blackouts.

Yet, as I wrote earlier, The Stream excels at improvisation. And that’s really what it takes to excel at integrate social media into any enterprise – the ability to adapt and excel when things don’t go as planned.

Likewise, whether Aziz and the rest of the RTC can stabilize Libya and turn it into a humane, democratic state will also require a great deal of improvisation.

Below is the video of the episode of Al Jazeera English's The Stream, titled, "Lybia's uncertain future."

U of I talks with prominent social media researchers now online

2011-08-23T18:40:00.001-05:00

It’s been a year since the University of Illinois hosted the “Year of Social Media,” a lecture series that hosted people at the forefront of the social media revolution.

During the series, Fernanda B. Viégas from Google spoke about bringing powerful, yet simple to operate, computer visualization programs to the masses. An Oxford professor postulated whether the internet is really a “fifth estate,” or if cyber utopianism is a “net delusion.” And the Onion web editor talked about how a social media conversation doesn’t always yield positive results.

“The Onion is very much not interested in having a conversation with its community of viewers and listeners in social media,” the Onion’s Baratunde Thurston said during his lecture, before playing an Onion sketch of a television news anchor being berated by audience members through social media.

Videos of all the talks are now available on the event’s website. The seven lecture videos total more than ten hours of footage.

“We have invited prominent researchers who study social media, leading figures from the social media industry, and people who embody social media success stories,” the YISM website reads.

The program was organized by Karrie Karahalios, a computer science professor and graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and Christian Sandvig, an Associate Professor of Communication, Media & Cinema Studies, Library & Information Science. Sandvig is also a Research Associate Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Abstracts of the speakers, obtained from the YISM website, are listed after the break. For the full videos, please visit https://www.informatics.uiuc.edu/display/infospeak/Home.

From Politics to Art: Visualization as a Medium
Fernanda B. Viégas, Google
Data visualization has historically been accessible only to the elite in academia, business, and government. It was "serious" technology, created by experts for experts. In recent years, however, web-based visualizations-ranging from political art projects to news stories-have reached audiences of millions. Meanwhile, new initiatives in government, aimed at all citizens, point to an era of increased transparency. What will this new era of data transparency and expressiveness look like-and what are the implications for technologists who work with data? To help answer this question, I report on work into public data analysis and visualization. Some of the results come from Many Eyes, a "living laboratory" web site where people may upload their own data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. Political discussions, citizen activism, religious conversations, game playing, and educational exchanges are all happening on Many Eyes. Finally, I discuss artistic projects that complicate and subvert the traditional notion of data visualization by highlighting its potential as an expressive medium that invites emotion.

Foursquare Rallies, Voter Protection, Open Joke Book and Other Awesome Things To Do With Social Media
Baratunde Thurston, The Onion
In this talk, comedian, political writer and Onion Digital Director Baratunde Thurston will share humorous and insightful tales from his years in the trenches of social media. Whether he's personifying the swine flu on Twitter, using wikis to protect the vote or taking Foursquare mayorships way too seriously, Baratunde is always pushing the established bounds of the latest web tools for entertainment and enlightenment.

Inference on the Social Web:
Tales of Translating Wikipedia and Bad Vision
Eytan Adar, University of Michigan
There is a great deal of optimism (rightfully) about the benefits of social systems in generating "collective wisdom." However, there are many situations where the collective is actually worse than the individual. Being able to distinguish between the success and failure cases of collective behaviors is as important as finding new ways to mine and leverage these behaviors. I'll cover two large projects (and a smattering of other ongoing work) that demonstrate the positive and negative features of automatically analyzed social data.
The first project focuses on the rapid globalization of Wikipedia. Pages for the same topic in many different languages are co-evolving but frequently at different rates leading to variance in size, scope, and quality. I'll describe a first attempt at reconciling these differences by automatically aligning Wikipedia data in different languages, detecting discrepancies and filling in missing information. The attractive feature of the method is that it uses the "wisdom" of independent groups to work effectively even in the absence of dictionaries.
The second project demonstrates the potential pitfalls of collective wisdom. Specifically, we look at collaborative visualizations systems in which systematic bias leads groups to make significant mistakes in the graphical perception of visualizations. By manipulating social signals in realistic ways, we were able to influence individuals in chart comprehension tasks. I'll cover how this was done, why social signals are particularly harmful, and how other kinds of collective behaviors might solve this problem.

The Fifth Estate of the Internet Realm
William H. Dutton, University of Oxford
The rise of the press, radio, television and other mass media created an independent institution: the 'Fourth Estate', central to pluralist democratic processes. However, the growing use of the Internet and related technologies enables the networking of individuals in ways that create a new source of accountability not only in government and politics, but also in other sectors. How does the Internet create a space for this new form of social accountability? Is it indeed enabling a 'Fifth Estate'?
The Internet is a platform for networking individuals in ways that can challenge the influence of other more established bases of institutional authority, and that can be used to increase the accountability of the press, politicians, doctors and academics by offering networked individuals with alternative sources of information and opinion. Questions about the governance of the Fifth Estate are likely to become more prominent as people realize that the Internet is a social phenomenon with broad and substantial implications for political and social accountability, as illustrated by the crisis over WikiLeaks. The development and vitality of the 'Fifth Estate' rests less on new policy initiatives than by responding to the strategies of its enemies – the other four estates, and the mob, of the Internet realm.

Vlogcast yourself:
Exploring nonverbal behavior in social media
Daniel Gatica-Perez, Idiap Research Institute
Video blogging (vlogging) has evolved from its "chat from your bedroom" initial format to a highly creative form of expression and communication, and represents one of the most popular types of user-generated content on sites like YouTube. Recent research in computational social media, including mining of blogs and online social networks, has made much progress on automatically analyzing text sources. However, human communication is more than the words we write: the nonverbal channel - gaze, facial expressions, body gestures and postures, prosody - plays a key role in the formation, maintenance, and evolution of a number of fundamental social constructs in face-to-face and remote communication settings.
In this talk, I will argue that the nonverbal channel available in vlogging opens several promising research lines in social media, and will present ongoing work towards automatic vlogger analysis from the nonverbal perspective. First, vlogging is multimodal in nature, and I will present audio and visual processing methods to characterize vloggers' nonverbal communicative behavior from cameras and microphones. Then, I will examine connections between vlogging behavior and social attention. Finally, I will present work on personality impressions in vlogging and their relation to nonverbal behavior, and discuss other open issues related to this novel form of interaction. Overall, my hope is that this research not only contributes to understand a successful phenomenon in social media, but can also add to the computational social science agenda by studying a human communication scenario that is rich and complex, and that provides behavioral data at scales and diversity not previously available due to natural limitations (e.g. in face-to-face interaction).

Digital Natives or Digital Naïves?
Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University
Lots of excitement surrounds social media innovations due to their potential to connect people and give voice to an unprecedented number of participants in public conversations. Who are the people most likely to embrace such opportunities? How universal is young adults' use of the tools and services that make such participation possible? Are popular assumptions about the inherent digital savvy of today's youth warranted? Drawing on unique data about the online know-how and practices of a diverse group of young adults, this talk highlights the role of skill in taking advantage of social media's potential benefits and explores what user characteristics are most likely to be associated with online contributions.

Knowledge in the Age of Social Media
David Weinberger, Harvard University
For thousands of years in the West, we have had a settled idea of knowledge: it is certain, the same for everyone, permanent, and masterable within its various domains, and is a quality of an individual's beliefs. It turns out in the Age of Social Media that those are properties not of knowledge but of the medium with which we have preserved and communicated it. As knowledge moves to the Net, it is acquiring the properties of its new medium – a network that is profoundly social, ever-changing, composed of links, and that contains perpetual disagreements. Perhaps knowledge's old medium has us looking in the wrong places for its new incarnation. Perhaps knowledge lives now not in books or skulls, but in networks of tweets and pages. This talk will begin to explore the effects the unsettling of knowledge is having on our institutions and our way of thinking about our world.

Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder - BATTLE IN THE BARRIO part 1/4

2011-08-22T22:01:00.001-05:00

From left: Lizette, Martha and Gloria Herrera, outside their family home in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. After a lifetime of living near the Fisk coal-powered plant, Martha and Gloria have developed lupus. Martha’s daughter, Lizette, also is showing early signs of the disease.

NOTE: The following is the first of a series of four stories about the environmental and health impact of coal fired power plants on densely-populated, low income Chicago communities. It's called "Battle in the Barrio: the Struggle in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood Against Pollution." More parts of this series, along with visualizations and some interactive elements, will be posted in the coming weeks. The series is part of a journalistic research project that culminated in a master's thesis for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For most of their lives, two of the four Herrera sisters -- Gloria and Martha -- thought that the hardest part of living in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago was staying safe from crime.

On a mid-July morning, as a fast-moving thunderstorm poured cool rain over the neighborhood and provided relief from the most oppressive heat wave in years, the two sisters reflected on some close calls.

“We were never allowed to hang out on the sidewalk,” Gloria, who is now 43, remembered of her childhood in Pilsen.

Outside, thunderclaps ricocheted off of the old brick houses, off the pastel-painted facade of restaurants with names like Nuevo Leon, La Casa Del Pueblo and La Cebollita, off murals of Che Guevara, Jesus and Mexican cowboys.

The day before, the National Weather Service measured a high temperature of 99 degrees from the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, with 78 percent humidity. The temperature, measured by the television station the sisters had muted while they talked, fell to 71 degrees. The raindrops splashed on the porch they had spent their summers on as children.

When Gloria wanted to play with neighborhood friends, they would have to get permission from their parents to come over – and then if they did get permission, her friends could only sit with Gloria on the porch. “Two houses down, there were gangbangers in that house. And there were gangbangers across the street on the corner house.”

“We had, like, four different gangs all around us,” said Martha, 54.

The streets belonged to the gangs. There was, however, something that belonged only to the children in the neighborhood.

“That’s why we played soccer,” she said. “Because it was ours, you know.”

The nearby playground of Benito Juarez High School provided a level of safety from the industrial streets of Pilsen, and a place where children could be themselves. Gloria and Martha still had to keep on their toes on the nine-block journey between their home on Carpenter Street and the high school.

“We would be coming back from soccer practice at five in the afternoon, or seven in the evening, and the gangs would be shooting at each other, and we had to crouch down and run home for two blocks. We would be hiding between cars just to get home safely,” Gloria said.

And even at home, the threat sometimes lingered.

“We would be sitting here watching TV, and you would hear gunshots,” she said. “We would throw ourselves on the floor.”

“That’s the life we learned to live. And our kids, also, same thing.”

Gang violence is an ever-present part of life in Pilsen, a sooty, post-industrial barrio on Chicago’s lower west side. But just in the last several years, a very real threat has trumped the Herrera’s safety concerns about gang violence. Unlike a stray bullet from a gang-banger’s gun, it could not be dodged by hiding behind cars.

Gloria remembered the exact day it started: Feb. 7, 2001.

“I remember, because it was very traumatic for me,” Gloria said.

She was attending a banquet for La CLASA, the Chicago Latin American Soccer Association, when she couldn’t take a full breath. “I just couldn’t breathe,” Gloria said, “So I was rushed to the emergency room.”

Gloria was diagnosed and treated for pneumonia and sent home. On July 7, she suffered a heart attack at work. A co-worker took her to the University of Illinois Medical Center, where hospital staff administered a battery of tests and determined that Gloria’s liver and kidneys were shutting down. Doctors gave her three days to live.

“It was our 9/11,” Martha said.

There was another curiosity in Gloria’s test results. Despite being a nonsmoker and a relatively young, athletic soccer player, doctors determined she had “smoker’s lungs.” Doctors couldn’t believe that Gloria had never smoked a day in her life.
“What are you hiding, you know?” Martha said, mimicking the doctors’ suspicions.
“They thought I was lying, that it was smoking,” Gloria said.

She remained in the hospital for the better part of a month, much of it in pain, without a diagnosis before Martha, told the hospital staff to diagnose Gloria with something or discharge her.

“So then the day after, they found what I had.” Gloria said. “And it was lupus.”
Lupus, or Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) as medical experts sometimes call it, is a disease of the immune system. Instead of attacking foreign invaders such as bacteria and viruses, the immune system of someone with lupus attacks the entire body, according to the Lupus Foundation of America (LFA).

“Lupus is a chronic, autoimmune disease that can damage any part of the body,” the LFA wrote on its website, lupus.org. “Chronic means that the signs and symptoms tend to last longer than six weeks and often for many years.”
Lupus can cause abnormal blood clotting, headaches, swollen joints, fever, anemia and swollen extremities.

“Many of these symptoms occur in other illnesses besides lupus,” the LFA wrote. “In fact, lupus is sometimes called ‘the great imitator’ because its symptoms are often like the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, blood disorders, fibromyalgia, diabetes, thyroid problems, Lyme disease, and a number of heart, lung, muscle, and bone diseases.”

For Gloria, those symptoms also included reduced blood circulation in her hands, which caused one of her fingers to turn black. Amputation would have been necessary, had the finger not responded to blood thinners and returned to a normal color.

Despite being a nonsmoker and a relatively young, athletic soccer player, doctors determined she had “smoker’s lungs.” Doctors couldn’t believe that Gloria had never smoked a day in her life.

Women are more susceptible, and Asian, Native American, African American and Hispanic women (such as Gloria and Martha) are most at risk of developing lupus, according to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

Although no comprehensive study has been done to measure the number of people affected by lupus, the medical community believes about five million people have the disease worldwide, according to the LFA, and that the frequency of lupus somewhere around 0.08 percent. Researchers also have found the likelihood of developing lupus jumps to between two and five percent for non-identical twins, meaning that there’s an important genetic component to lupus.

Even so, only about ten percent of lupus patients have a first or second-degree relative who have lupus, according to the S.L.E. Lupus Foundation.

Gloria’s doctors told her that they didn’t think lupus was a genetic disease.

That’s why Martha didn’t expect to be diagnosed with the disease in 2003.

“I was coming down the stairs and I fell, and of course I ended up in the emergency room,” Martha recalled. “A year later, I got a blood clot in my leg. Two weeks after that, it goes to my lungs.”

More tests revealed that Martha had lupus, just like her sister.

Later, the two other Herrera sisters, Patti and Berta, also developed lupus, along with the oldest of Martha’s three daughters. And now Lizette, Martha’s middle daughter, who also lives in Pilsen, shows early signs of developing the disease, along with other medical problems.

“Just recently I was in the hospital. I had fainted at work,” Lizette Herrera said. “Three months before that, I had a seizure, and every time I got sent home, because it was an unknown cause.”

“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I just work and take care of my son, and that’s it. And while we’re talking, I feel dizzy and fall. It’s been happening more and more as I get older, it’s just so often.”

Martha laughed.

“We laugh at things because there’s no other way,” she said.

So far, no “lupus gene” has been found, but lupus researchers believe it takes both a genetic predisposition and certain environmental circumstances for a patient to develop full-blown lupus. “While a person’s genes may increase the chance that he or she will develop lupus, it takes some kind of environmental trigger to set off the illness or to bring on a flare,” the LFA concluded. Such an environmental trigger could be infection, severe emotional or physical stress, illness or injury. Pollution could also be a trigger.

Since Gloria’s brush with death and the barrage of other medical catastrophes, the Herrera family is looking at the 450-foot tall stack of the Fisk Generating Station, which looms over Pilsen homes, with increasing suspicion.

“They’re saying that it’s not hereditary,” Martha said. “Why is it that we all have signs?”

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), in 2008, the Fisk coal plant emitted 4,485 tons of sulfur dioxide and 1,172 tons of nitrogen oxides.

That same year, the EPA released a 479-page report titled “Integrated Science Assessment (ISA) for Sulfur Oxides – Health Criteria,” which found that short-term exposure to SO2 could cause “an array of respiratory outcomes, including respiratory symptoms, lung function, airway inflammation, AHR (airways hyper responsiveness), and ED (emergency department) visits and hospitalizations.” The EPA has noted a similar effect from nitrogen oxides.

Additionally, the plant emitted 126 pounds of lead, 82 pounds of mercury and 755 tons of particulate emissions into Pilsen and the nearby Chicago area.
All of those emissions, researchers say, are costing lives in Chicago. The Fisk coal-powered plant contributes to 15 deaths and 23 heart attacks each year, according to a 2010 report by the Clean Air Task Force, which used the same peer-reviewed methodology as the EPA.

The Herreras live a half of a mile from the plant, near Eighteenth Street.

“It was just part of everyday life,” Martha said. “You wake up in the morning, and it smells horrible. The hotter it got, the worse the smell.”

“All of our kids are migraine sufferers now,” Gloria said. “All my four, they all get migraines. I suffer from migraines. So I was told not to take Excedrin because according to what the doctor said, Excedrin triggers lupus.”

“And so, OK, so pollution doesn’t trigger anything? Everyone has the same symptoms.”

It may turn out that the Herreras are on the right track, as a growing body of medical research is linking industrial pollution to flare-ups of lupus.

A study of an African-American community in Gainesville, Georgia, published in 1997, found a nine-fold increase in incidence among those with long-term exposure to industrial pollution. The two researchers from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University who conducted the study concluded that “long-standing exposure to industrial emissions may be associated with an increased risk of lupus.”

Another medical study, this one conducted in Montreal, Canada, and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives in 2010, found that an increase in particulate matter pollution may trigger disease in those who have lupus.

“To our knowledge, the results presented here are the first to suggest that autoimmune inflammatory diseases such as SLE may be associated with variations in air pollutant levels,” the researchers wrote. “These findings add to a multitude of studies that have consistently related the adverse health effects (both acute and chronic) of ambient fine PM (particulate matter).”

“This study also adds weight to concerns that ambient air pollutants may be an important trigger of inflammation and autoimmunity.”

Gloria and Martha said they only recently have become concerned with the quality of air in Pilsen. Before the diagnoses, the smoggy Pilsen air was simply a fact of life.

“It was just part of everyday life,” Martha said. “You wake up in the morning, and it smells horrible. The hotter it got, the worse the smell.”

The 450-foot stack of Midwest Generation’s Fisk power plant
looms over the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.

They both remembered a time when they could see piles of coal, tall enough to see from blocks away. In the heat of the summer, they would catch fire, and an unmistakable burning stench would waft through the neighborhood.

“We used to practice soccer around there when we were younger. And we would come back, and the coal would be burning. Then the fire trucks would be over there putting it out, and you know, people doing their daily things and the coal was burning,” Gloria said.

“It was just, you know, like how people live where volcanoes are. It was like a natural thing,” Martha said. “There were mornings when you could wake up and you could smell it.”

Today, Gloria takes 12 different medications to control her lupus. She could afford the bill until recently, when she lost her job working for the city.

“It’s actually funny. I was a rapid response coordinator, so I would assist people that were being laid off,” she said.

Her job entailed going to companies throughout the Chicagoland area and educate newly laid-off workers about how to obtain services for re-employment or training.
“And now I’m on the other side, and I can’t seem to get any services.”

Her medications will cost her about $1,000 a month now, she guesses, because she has no insurance. She doesn’t know how long she’ll be able to afford taking them.
“You work all of your life, you know, to build something for when you retire, and then the same system is bringing you down,” Martha said. “Honestly, I worry a lot about her.”

It’s one more frustration to add to life in Pilsen. Martha said her brother, who is a police officer, is concerned about his family’s safety, and is “sick of this neighborhood.”

“He just wants to move,” Martha said.

Lizette Herrera said she doesn’t want to raise her son in the neighborhood, and she and her fiancée are looking to move out. She remembered one day when she was seven or eight (she couldn’t recall exactly), when she had to hide behind garbage cans to avoid a spat of gang violence. A man had been shot in the leg, and was bleeding in the street.

“I remember like it was yesterday,” Lizette said. “I was so little. We were all so little.”

“One of my sons said it was just like the movies, that the blood is shooting out,” Gloria said.

“He was holding his leg, screaming,” Lizette said. “And everyone was there.”

“They’re under 10 and seeing all of this,” Gloria said.

Google scholarship signals growth in data journalism field

2011-08-17T11:00:00.001-05:00

Google announced Monday that it would give $20,000 to journalism students who can mash-up computer science and enterprise reporting.

The scholarship program is a joint venture between the Associated Press (AP) and Google, and will be administered by the Online News Association (ONA).

“The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship program will provide $20,000 scholarships for the 2012-13 academic year to six promising undergraduate or graduate students pursuing or planning to pursue degrees at the intersection of journalism, computer science and new media,” Google and the AP wrote in a press release. “The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism.”

On the official Google blog, ONA executive director Jane McDonnell said the goal of the scholarship was “to shine a light on the hidden treasures in schools across the country—the digital-minded journalists who will be the future of our industry.”

More information is available at http://ap-google.onlinenewsassociation.org/

The AP-Google scholarship is one of the latest initiatives to bolster the ranks of journalists with data specialists who can use computer skills to sort, filter and describe important trends hiding in a sea of public data. Those trends can be a springboard to launch investigations into a wide variety of issues, including poverty, health, crime and social justice.

The need for those types of computer and analytical skills is only increasing as governments begin to publish on the internet troves of documents that were previously difficult to access.

Brant Houston, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation chair for enterprise and investigative reporting at the University of Illinois, wrote in the summer 2010 Nieman Reports that data journalists could help improve the nation’s investigative reporting strength.

“Digital media’s capabilities might provide ways to hold public agencies accountable while expanding journalists’ role as community watchdogs,” he wrote.

UK social media crackdown could violate human rights, is poor strategy.

2011-08-16T11:00:00.002-05:00

photo from the London and UK Riots public pool on Flikr

Police forces in the United Kingdom arrested more than 2,500 in response to rioting last week in London, according to the Guardian’s Datablog.

The Datablog’s latest information shows that rioters caused at least £100 million in damages (equivalent to $163 million). The blog’s data also indicates that the majority of those arrested for rioting were born in the 1990s, and lived in predominantly “underclass” neighborhoods.

Reacting to the civil unrest, Prime Minister David Cameron began steps to crack down on social media.

“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized by social media,” Cameron said in a speech before parliament August 10. “Free flow of information can be used for good, but it can also be used for ill, but it can also be used for ill, so we are working with police and intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

UK politicians and law enforcement officials are due to meet with representatives from major social networking players including Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry, reported Forbes.

Here is the video of Cameron’s speech before parliament, posted by The Telegraph.

But according to the current version of the United Nations Declaration of Human rights, a crackdown would not be right. According to Article 19 of the Declaration, known as the “Right to Communicate,” states: “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”

The Declaration of Human rights was ratified in 1948 by the United Nations. While it isn’t a treaty, the Declaration serves as the basis for international laws on human rights. It also defines the human rights that are mentioned in the UN’s founding charter, a document which UN member states have signed and are bound to uphold.

The United Kingdom, which is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, likewise is bound by the agreement.

Most recently, the United Nations added comments to Article 19 that clarified what the Right to Communicate should mean in the age of digital communications. The comment, filed July 21, stated that the Right to Communicate defends political discourse, journalism, artistic expressions and the discussion of human rights. But the provision also protects communication regardless of medium, as “they include all forms of audio-visual as well as electronic and internet-based modes of expression.”

“States parties should take account of the extent to which developments in information and communication technologies, such as internet and mobile based electronic information dissemination systems, have substantially changed communication practices around the world,” the document states. “There is now a global network to exchange ideas and opinions that does not necessarily rely on the traditional mass media intermediaries. States parties should take all necessary steps to foster the independence of these new media and to ensure access of individuals thereto.”

There is, however, one critical restriction to free communication as it is outlined in the Declaration of Human rights. And that is a restriction on the right to communicate “for the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.”

At the same time, the United Nations specifies that restrictions cannot be over-broad, and governments who restrict the right to communication “must demonstrate in specific and individualized fashion the precise nature of the threat, and the necessity and proportionality of the specific action taken, in particular by establishing a direct and immediate connection between the expression and the threat.”

The conservative UK government might argue that it is within the bounds of international human rights to stop messages between members of a mob who are “plotting violence, disorder and criminality.” But blocking communications and disrupting protests fit the modus operandi for authoritarian regimes, not free, democratic states. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “authoritarian” as “Favourable to the principle of authority as opposed to that of individual freedom.”

Authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia used the same tactics described by Cameron amidst the social uprising known as the “Arab Spring.” In those cases, the governments blocked wide swaths of social networking sites, or terminated the country’s connection to the World Wide Web entirely. Traditionally, governments who stifle communication among their citizens do not do so in a limited fashion.

Cameron’s statement suggests that social networks contributed to the rioting in London. Yet blocking the internet might only exacerbate problems. The recent uprising in authoritarian countries demonstrate that when internet communications are blocked amidst a revolt, social unrest only increased.

“In some cases, most notably in Egypt, the move appeared to prompt more angry protesters into the streets,” wrote the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal quoted the director of research of the Packet Clearing House, an organization that studies global Internet traffic, who said “It shows they’re responding to the moment rather than thinking strategically, and any government that has devolved to that point is probably on its way out.”

Social media censorship strategy draws criticism

The similarity of Cameron’s recommendations to the actions of North African regimes was not lost on the internet community. Jeff Jarvis, who writes a column on new media for the Guardian, wrote of his skepticism of those who would be in charge of deciding which comments and photos would be censored.

“Beware, sir. If you take these steps, what separates you from the Saudi government demanding the ability to listen to and restrict its BBM networks? What separates you from Arab tyrannies cutting off social communication via Twitter or from China banning it?” Jarvis Wrote.

Other commentators say the best way to stop rioting in London is not adopting the authoritarian method of shutting down social networks, but rather, addressing the underlying reasons why social unrest occurs.

Peter Nowak, writing for Canadian Business, called internet censorship a “bone-headed idea,” and wrote that it would only lead to more anger and violence. But he also pointed to deep-rooted economic inequalities as the cause of the riots.

“Further eroding civil liberties is likely to fuel what I believe to be the underlying cause of the unrest that’s popping up around the globe: a deep frustration with a system that is seeing the world’s growing wealth increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people,” Nowak wrote. “That system may have worked in the past but since the wide-scale rise of the Internet over the past 20 years, the masses are more aware of what they don’t have than ever before. And they’re not happy about it. Taking away more of their rights is only going to make them madder.”

Actor-comedian Russell Brand made similar points in his editorial for the Guardian, arguing that the youths who took part in the violence had destroyed parts of London largely due to depressing economic prospects, along with a strong sense of not belonging. He pointed to the disparity between the harsh prosecution of looters and the lax treatment of London bankers during the 2010 financial collapse as a major source of discontent.

“These young people have no sense of community because they haven’t been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron’s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing. If we don’t want our young people to tear apart our communities then don’t let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together,” he wrote.

“As you have by now surely noticed, I don't know enough about politics to ponder a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing corporate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alienation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know, the solution is all around us and it isn’t political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said: ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’”

Russell brand donated his earnings from writing the column to aid cleanup efforts.

Meanwhile, on Monday, Cameron announced a new initiative to “stamp out gang culture,” and blamed the unrest on “slow-motion moral collapse.”

This author is an organizer with Communication is Your Right, an informational and advocacy campaign to raise awareness of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and specifically the Right to Communicate.

Breaking down the downgrade: distilling the message with visualizations and context.

2011-08-09T19:01:00.001-05:00

Markets, both domestic and abroad, spent no time to react on the news that Standard & Poor’s, one of the three major companies that rate the solvency of nations, had downgraded the United States credit rating from AAA to AA+.

S&P released its report on the downgrade on Friday, Aug. 6, after American markets were closed. Overseas markets were the first to move, with Japan’s Nikkei index dropping 2.2 percent. A sell-off sent China’s mainland Shanghai market down 2.2 percent. The country’s Hang Seng index flirted with a 7 percent drop before settling down 4.5 percent for the day.

When it came time for America’s markets to open the following Monday, the Dow lost several hundred points in the first hour of trading, and ended down 512 points 4.3 percent. It was the biggest one-day drop since Dec. 1, 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported. It’s among the top 10 biggest one-day DIJA declines ever, the Journal wrote. Crude oil prices also fell amidst concerns about lower demand.

But what does the S&P report actually say? How can we distill and best represent it? The following word cloud identifies dominant words in the document, with the size of a word relating to its presence in the document.

As you can see, the dominant theme is “debt,” as in, “Our lowering of the rating was prompted by our view on the rising public debt burden and our perception of greater policymaking uncertainty.”

Another theme that jumps out from the word cloud is “long-term,” as in, “The outlook on the long-term rating is negative.”

Here’s another breakdown of the “debt” theme throughout the S&P report; a word-tree that shows the relationship between “debt” and other words. Clicking on the image will open another window where you can interact with the words.

From this, we can draw additional context. “Debt” is strongly linked to “burden” (which could just be another word for indebtedness) and “outlook negative.”

But there’s another word here that yields more interesting results: political. Again, click to interact with the visualization.

The word “political” is used 10 times in the document. The strongest things the S&P report has to say about politics in the matter of the U.S. credit downgrade comes in two sentences, one right after the other, located in the same paragraph:

“The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy,” Standard and Poor’s wrote. “Despite this year’s wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently.”

So what is the political background for this document?

In a speech that broke on major networks during midday trading on Monday, President Obama criticized S&P’s downgrade, saying “No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country.”

Obama adviser David Axelrod, highlighting Republican obstructionism throughout the debt-ceiling talks, on national television called the S&P action “essentially a tea party downgrade.” “The tea party brought us to the brink of default,” he said on CBS’ Face the Nation.

Other high-profile Democrats echoed the same message. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry “This is the tea party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered even the will of many Republicans in the United States Senate who were prepared to do a bigger deal.”

Republican opponents seized an opportunity to grandstand and criticize the current Administration. Staffers for Mitt Romney, a forerunner in the GOP race for the presidency, told reporters that the former Massachusetts governor would attack Obama for the downgrade in a campaign speech.

A prepared speech for a recent campaign stop has Romney as saying “The president’s failure to put our nation’s fiscal and economic house in order has caused a massive loss of confidence that resulted in an embarrassing downgrade,” according to CNN.

However, the S&P report itself might be considered a political document; a chip played by a powerful player.

Standard & Poor’s is owned by the McGraw-Hill Companies, which better known for publishing educational books and trade journals. In 2010, it spent a company record of $1.65 million on lobbying, according to OpenSecrets.org.

According to records, it spent most of its time and money lobbying on financial issues. In 2010, if lobbied on at least 15 separate issues relating to financial regulation, including the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (H.R. 4173), which tightened regulations on credit rating agencies. (The specific requirements to credit rating agencies is in Subtitle C of Title IX of the law, also known as the Investor Protection and Securities Reform Act of 2010)

Lobbying by McGraw-Hill peaked in 2010, just as the
Wall Street reform act was being penned. Chart
is from OpenSecrets.org.

“The three major credit rating companies poised to decide whether to downgrade the nation's top-ranked debt standing are at the same time spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby the Obama administration and Congress over the way the government regulates them,” the AP reported earlier in August.

McGraw-Hill wrote in its annual filing for the Security and Exchange Commission in 2010 that the new requirements may cost the company money.

“The Act also amended the law that establishes pleading standards in securities fraud suits brought against credit rating agencies under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934,” the company wrote. “The change in the pleading standards may result in increased litigation costs for the Company; however, the law does not amend the liability standard in such lawsuits which continues to be the same standard applicable to all defendants.”

McGraw-Hill spokespeople insist there’s a wall between the lobbying wing and the credit-rating wing of its operation. But analysts are concerned about a conflict of interest in the system, which has led some to question the credibility of S&P’s rating, and regard it as a kind of political move. Critics have pointed to S&P’s role in the housing and mortgage bubble, in which it gave high investment grades to risky, complicated financial instruments.

“S&P gave investment grade rating to hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage backed securities They received tens of millions of dollars from the investment banks for these ratings,” the economist Dean Baker wrote.

“Does S&P think the U.S. government will forget how to print dollars? If that is not what the downgrade means then it would be helpful to explain what it does mean. Readers of this article would likely be confused since there is no obvious meaning that could be attached to this downgrade.”

One last visualization of the S&P downgrade shows the frequency of some key words. Again, click to expand and interact:

The entire S&P report is available here.

Visualization shows expansion, peak and fall of the American newspaper

2011-08-05T17:41:00.001-05:00

A new visualization from Stanford University charts the expansion of printing presses as early settlers headed west, as well as the peak and decline of the American newspaper.

It’s also highly interactive, letting users scroll back and forth through the American history of newspapers, pausing for textual markers at historically significant times. Users also get a breakdown of the publications serving a particular town, and can filter papers by the language they were published in or by publication frequency.

This was a major undertaking from the Rural West Initiative of Stanford University, which involved tapping into a directory of some 140,000 American newspapers at the Library of Congress.

“It would be fairer to call this a ‘database’ visualization than an omniscient creator’s-eye view of the growth of American newspapers,” the Rural West Initiative writes on an introduction to the visualization. “There are known (and surely unknown) omissions from this list, as well as duplicate entries, and entries that are similar and can appear duplicative.”

The visualization accompanies a report by the Initiative which indicates that while metro journalism has been on the decline for decades, rural journalism is still alive and thriving, although the job makes for “a lean living” for rural journalists and most papers are “an advertiser or two away from red ink.” Many reporters and some editors are fresh out of J-school.

Geoff McGhee, the Bill Lane Center creative director, and Judy Muller, a contributing editor at the Rural West Initiative, will both be on the Salt Lake City NPR station KUER to discuss the report August 8, at 10 a.m. pacific time (12 p.m. central, 1 p.m. eastern). It will also be simulcast on the SiriusXM Public radio channel.

Listeners can call the station at (801) 585-WEST or submit questions at radiowest@kuer.org. The station website has a live stream and will archive the show as a podcast.

The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University lab tweeted of the interactive map, “How cool (or sad?) is this?” That’s because the dots peak at about 1920, and decline to the number we see today. Most news begins life in a newspaper news room, according to a 2009 Pew study on the Baltimore news ecosystem.

“Fully eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information,” Pew wrote. “Indeed the expanding universe of new media, including blogs, Twitter and local websites—at least in Baltimore—played only a limited role: mainly an alert system and a way to disseminate stories from other places.”

The Initiative’s report seems to support Pew’s conclusions.

For some original reporting about the St. Louis newspaper market, including several visuals about the rise and fall of newspapers in the city, along with a report about a nonprofit newsroom trying to buck the trend, read “Funding Challenges, Long-term Aspirations of a Nonprofit Newsroom.”

Former Ill. Gov. Edgar on Politicians Molding the Media, Blagojevich Retrial

2011-05-31T11:30:00.007-05:00

Former Ill. Gov. Jim Edgar speaks to graduate journalism students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on May 4 about the relationship between politicians and the press, and about the odds that former governor Rod Blagojevich will be found guilty in his corruption retrial.

For those who like to play “what if,” imagine this scenario.

Jim Edgar, the Republican Illinois governor from 1991 to 1999, leaves office with a high approval rating. He’s generally well-respected by the media and the voting public. In 2003, U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald announces he’s not going to run again, which inspires President George Bush to call Edgar and ask him to run for the seat.

Edgar says yes. Despite running in a Blue state, because of his generally positive reputation as governor and center-leaning Republican, he wins the race in a landslide and becomes the next Illinois senator.

That’s not what happened. While Edgar left office with a 60 percent approval rating, and was asked by President Bush to go for the senate seat, Edgar declined.

Instead, Alan Keyes ran against Barack Obama. Keyes had extremely little credibility in Illinois, especially in Chicago, where he had adopted legal residence only just before the election. The race was no contest for Obama, who easily won with 70 percent of the vote. But being the presidential catapult the Illinois senate seat turned out to be, it’s obvious how different American politics could have been if Edgar decided to run.

“I remember a couple of times they tried to get me to run for the senate, and I decided against doing it, and some of the media guys from Chicago said ‘You’re right, we’re a lot nastier than we used to be,’” Edgar said to the small class of University of Illinois graduate journalism students in early May.

He’s now a distinguished fellow of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs (IGPA) at the U of I. The position affords him the opportunity to talk to journalism students about the power of media from a very different perspective – a politician dependent on the media to carry a message to the public.

“I’m not running for office, so I’m pretty candid these days,” he said.

Early in his campaign, Edgar tried increasing his media presence with press conferences about policy reform. However, government policy wasn’t exciting enough for the Illinois media to cover.

When he was running for governor, Edgar organized a press conference about his drug policy that was specially-made for maximum media coverage. It was organized at a Rotary club in downtown Chicago, at noon, close to the media hub of Illinois. Edgar didn’t usually prepare a speech beforehand, but wrote one for the special occasion.

“We had it all done right. So twelve o’clock comes, we have all the Rotarians come,” Edgar recalled. “And we had one news media person show up. One out of the entire state.”

That reporter was Tom Hardy from the Chicago Tribune, who hadn’t come there because of the unveiling of the drug policy.

“He just hadn’t covered me for a few weeks and wanted to see how I was doing,” Edgar said.

“He later became my press secretary,” he said. “He was a good guy.”

Edgar was leading in the polls at the time due to his popularity “down-state,” but the fate of that election ultimately rode on the Chicago suburbs electorate. As was the case in so many Illinois elections, the ‘burbs became the battleground, and so Edgar still needed coverage from the Chicago media.

He tried again and scheduled a press conference at more convenient time (a Saturday afternoon, when the television media was generally the hungriest for news) and a more convenient location (a scenic part of the Chicago River). The subject of the press conference: environmental policy.

“There’s the Chicago River, beautiful weather,” he said. “Nobody shows up. After a while, you think, hey, probably isn’t a good idea to keep talking about issues and putting out position papers and all that.”

Edgar changed tactics as Election Day drew near. The polls showed Edgar and the then-attorney general were nearly equal. It’s the story he most likes to tell young journalists: on the last weekend before the election, considered the biggest media day for political coverage, before the news media, Edgar held up a frozen waffle.

He claimed that that if his opponent wins the election, the waffle will become the state seal of Illinois. He said his opponent was a flip-flopper and waffled on the issues.

“And what happened that evening? The story about me holding up that waffle. Next day in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, was me holding up that waffle,” Edgar said.

“Now that was pretty hokey,” the former governor conceded. “My wife joked about it, but that got you coverage.”

Media "didn't have a clue"

Even when Edgar won the election and become governor, it was only the beginning of a long battle to get the media’s attention, he said.

“We politicians always try to figure out how to manipulate you guys or how to get our message across.”

But the relationship between the governorship and the press was not always as one-sided. His office would give preferential treatment and exclusives to reporters who he felt offered fair coverage, Edgar said. But elected officials would also take note when newspaper editorial boards would take on an issue.

“Who wants to be an editorial writer? Who reads editorials? Well nobody, except politicians, and public officials. That’s a pretty good group to get to,” Edgar said.

“Editorials I don't think get you many votes on election day, but it sure scares politicians.”

He said former Governor George Ryan, who took office after the Edgar administration, took up the cause of abolishing the death penalty after the Tribune ran an editorial condemning the executions. In 2005, Ryan was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. One year later, he was convicted of selling truck licenses for bribes and steering lucrative state contracts to cronies.

Ill. Gov. George Ryan at the Illinois State Fair in 2002.
Photo by Randy von Liski, on Flickr.

In February, while serving time in a Terre Haute, Ind. penitentiary for his crimes, Ryan was again nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, by U of I law Professor Francis A. Boyle.

“And the media keeps that issue in front of the legislature and in front of the public. By keeping it in front of the public, the legislature knew they couldn’t ignore it. That’s one of the powers you have in the media after the election.”

“I had a group of down-state publishers and they asked me to come and talk to them and I did, and they said ‘What’s going to be the issue before the legislature this year?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, you haven't told us yet.’”

It’s particularly difficult for politicians to gain traction on controversial issues when the media ignores the issue, Edgar said.

The elder statesman characterized the Springfield press corps as competent during his office, he recalled. But he said television media and the press elsewhere in the state had a high turnover rate, which meant those reporters often times didn’t have the skill to cultivate important stories.

“The outlying press corps in Illinois, they didn’t have a clue. Downstate you care more about state government, but many of them were brand new. Every time I’d go to the Quad Cities or Rockford, I’d meet new people,” Edgar said.

“The pay is so little, people just pass through. They weren’t there a long time to get the continuity. You have a press corps that has some longevity, and they heard this story before. They know when they’re getting snowed.”

The Chicago press had some of the most experienced reporters, Edgar said, but they weren’t concerned with politics outside of Chicago.

“The Chicago press corps, I liked them, but they didn’t have a clue,” he said. “They’d cover me in Chicago, but it was all how it would help city hall. State government does not get the coverage that it used to.”

“The Chicago press corps did not understand about the issues in Springfield. They did not care about the issues in Springfield. They only cared if I was in a fight with Mayor Daley.”

With Blago, hobbled media "got sloppy," left open opportunity for corruption

Edgar said he thinks that inattention in the press corps, especially the Chicago press corps, allowed the Rod Blagojevich scandal to fester. May 26, the former, twice-elected governor took the stand during his corruption retrial to answer questions about whether he tried to sell the U.S. Senate seat that Obama vacated.

“The media got a little sloppy, too,” Edgar said. “Particularly the Chicago media.”

Part of the impetus for politicians to stay clean is a competent press, which operates as a balance for power-hungry politicians, Edgar said. He said that responsibility includes more than making Woodward-and-Burnstein-caliber exposés, but explaining the mundane, and sometimes complicated, duties of the Illinois legislature.

The Department of Justice's booking photo of Blagojevich,
after he was arrested in 2008 at his Chicago home.

Of Blagojevich, Edgar said he was confident that the jury would come up with a guilty verdict in the latest trial.

“I think there was a one in a million chance that the jury would find him innocent, and they had that the last time,” he said. “He’s still going to go to jail for perjury, and I know the judge [James Zagel]. He will send him for everything he can.”

If Blagojevich gets off with a hung jury or is found innocent, that could discourage young Illinoisans from pursuing a career in public service, Edgar said. He said that while Chicago does politics a little “rougher” than it’s done downstate, it had never been “that bad.”

“I got to tell you, even when I was out of office, I heard story and saw things that it was obvious,” Edgar said. “With this guy, everything was for sale. And that’s not the way it’s done.”

Edgar said that much had changed about the media since he left the governor’s mansion. While the media was preoccupied with sensationalism before, that obsession has increased in recent years, he said. Profits still guide the media.

“[Newspapers are] usually owned by someone who is concerned about the bottom line, not concerned about making a good newspaper. You look for sensationalism more than you look for factual.”

And yet, the need for facts is only increasing, he added.

“We more need the media today to provide information, because things are more complicated today than they were forty years ago.”

A Radical New Mission for Drones: Helping Journalists find Truth

2011-05-26T20:52:00.000-05:00

Drones are mostly associated with the ongoing war in Afghanistan and Pakistan – where they continue to shoot missiles and drop bombs on the insurgency. Between 1,492 and 2,378 died from drone attacks in Pakistan between 2004 and May 24, 2011, according to theNew America Foundation, and the number of drone attacks have more than doubled under the Obama administration.

The drones present serious concerns for the Pakistanis about their own safety and sovereignty, and have sparked protests at the UK parliament.

The military-industrial complex and global politics have greatly advanced both the application and development of military drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), as they’re called in military parlance. A large, jet-powered stealth drone played a majorrole in tracking down Osama bin Laden. Now there’s entire military expos dedicated solely to UAVs.

But armed conflict and espionage are not a drone’s raison d'être. Strictly speaking, a drone is simply an unmanned vehicle that guided remotely, or is self-guiding. And just as the advancement of drone technology has increased the military’s capabilities, those advancements have trickled down to the private commercial sector.

With a little know-how, a resourceful civilian – or journalist -- can order “off-the-shelf” components and make and fly a drone.

Hobbyists are Ahead of the Game

Communities of people who do just that can be found in online forums such as DIYDrones.com, founded by Wired’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson (who also founded 3D Robotics, which sells drone technology to hobbyists).

One drone hobbyist used his aircraft to stitch together a map of a 2.4 square-kilometer area (about 593 acres, or 0.92 miles) using aerial photos and software. He was able to collect the photos in one day, and combine them into a map within four days.

Using a drone and aerial photography software, a Polish hobbyist was able to stitch together this high-resolution map in less than a week and for relatively little cash.

The Polish UAV hobbyist, Krzysztof Bosak, wrote that UAV aerial photography, even from a hobbyist prototype, “is a blitz compared to a few months of delay from satellite or a few weeks of delay (typically) from full scale airplane mapping company.” Bosak also works for TriggerComposites, which sells UAV services for photomapping, environmental survey, search and rescue, research and publicity.

This kind of quick, inexpensive solution to mapping and aerial photography could just as easily be applied to journalism. For instance, mapping the devastation that recent tornadoes inflicted on Joplin, Mo., might yield some evidence about the safety of structures in that town. It would also indicate what part of towns were safest, and which didn’t stand a chance.

Old Craft, New Tech, and a Radical New Mission

When hurricane Andrew wreaked havoc on southeatern Florida in 1992, Miami Herald reporters used damage reports from Dade county, combined with maps of the hurricane’s wind speeds, to demonstrate that newer houses were the least likely to emerge from the storm unharmed. Follow-up reporting yielded that newer structures were indeed insufficiently safe (some roofs were held on with nothing more than large staples), and local housing inspectors were so overwhelmed by the demands of urban sprawl that they couldn’t adequately do their jobs. The reporters earned a Pulitzer Prize for their work.

Reports on the damaged houses were hard to come by initially, and the investigation process was long and involved. The hurricane hit on August 24, and the Herald released its special report, “What Went Wrong,” on December 20. But it’s easy to imagine how an enterprising reporter, armed with a drone and mapping software, could map the damage over several weeks and come to similar conclusions.

Because a drone can be a platform for any number of sensors, a drone could just as easily measure the radioactivity near an imperiled nuclear facility (for instance, the Fukushima Daiichi plant post-earthquake), or take stock of contaminants and pollutants near an industrial plant.

Boser's "Pteryx" UAV in flight. From DIYDrones.com

Declining tech costs means the utility of a drone to an investigative journalist is dependent less on the monetary resources afforded to her or him, and dependent more on ingenuity. Journalists can look to the ways various regulatory bodies or other government agencies are using drone technology to conduct their work, and adapt those models for their own investigative needs. Collaborating with scientists and engineers can increase the reliability of data reporting and adds credibility to investigations.

Much can be accomplished with drone-guided reporting in the States, but some of the biggest journalistic achievements can come from the most dangerous places on earth.

For example, the Arab Spring uprising has resulted in been notoriously difficult to report on. More than 450 journalists have been attacked by mobs or government authorities since the uprising began, according to the Overseas Press Club of America. And 16 journalists have died so far in 2011, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists.

One of the most recent, high-profile casualties were Getty combat photographer Chris Hondros and “Restrepo” director and producer Tim Hetherington. The two were killed while on assignment, reporting on the Libyan civil war.

There has been some measure of success in reporting this historic shift in Arab power, mostly because of protesters’ use of social media. Protestors and protest organizers will sometimes upload on the internet photos and videos of government abuses. Some are extremely graphic, showing the maimed and bloodied bodies of protestors, and it’s obvious that the documentarians put themselves in harm’s way in shooting the images.

If reporters are able to launch drones in the midst of an uprising, and capture with an “eye in the sky” oppression or crimes against humanity, potentially to a live, international television or internet audience, it would revolutionize the way events abroad are reported and realized.

Drones could provide additional reporting muscle during times of increased human rights abuses -- such as those during the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and elsewhere. Photo of Egypt protestors courtesy of Amnesty International.

While the risks are much lower at home, drone-wielding journalists will still have to come to grips with media laws that they have always fought against, and some extra ones. For instance, these aircraft only meet Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations if they fly under 400 feet, and within “line-of-sight” of the operator. Additionally, placing a camera on any device that reaches places where humans normally can’t, and peeking on private citizens, is an obvious privacy law issue.

From a legal standpoint, the risks are obviously great. But there’s also potentially enormous rewards for the tech-savvy journalist with a drone.

U of I sends alert for shooter who doesn’t exist, social media backlash follows. UPDATE

2011-05-03T13:09:00.004-05:00

I was just notified today that the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) awarded our team at the CampusCrime.net project a National Mark of Excellence (MOE) award. The following is a repost from my other blog, The Horseshoe, which explains how the University's emergency alert system has created a climate of fear on campus -- especially in this most recent incident, on March 24, where a false alarm about a shooter on campus frightened students, parents, faculty and staff.

About 87,000 emails and cell phones received a startling message around 10:40 CST, when the minders of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign emergency alert system mistakenly sent the following message:

“Active shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or shield/secure your location.”

Almost immediately, students began texting and updating their online social networks to gather information.

Until this, the campus was at a lull -- most students had migrated home for spring break. But the previous day, U of I police sent out alerts about a large fire which destroyed a longstanding gyros eatery on Green Street, a popular destination for students. Some thought it was a poor use of resource meant to keep students abreast of life-endangering emergencies, not to be abused by broadcasting contained situations.

Then, about 11 minutes later, U of I police send this message:

“The previous message was sent in error. For details, please read forthcoming MassMail.”

Then, six hours later, the mass email arrived:

“To the campus community: This morning at 10:40, an Illini-Alert message was sent to 87,000 email addresses and cellphones indicating there was an active shooter or threat of an active shooter on the Urbana campus. The message was sent accidentally while pre-scripted templates used in the Illini-Alert system were being updated. The updates were being made in response to user feedback in order to enhance information provided in the alerts.”

The message continued, “The Chief of Police has charged the campus emergency planning office with reviewing and documenting todays incident. We are reviewing comments we are receiving as a result of the incident and will implement all reasonable and appropriate ideas or suggestions.”

But the incident had already reached national attention. The Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, the Associated Press, Time and Gawker Media.

Even Funkmaster Flex, hiphop DJ on New York’s Hot 97 radio station, tweeted and wrote about it.

This is a Streamgraph of messages containing “U of I” on twitter. Tweets made on Wednesday, March 23 with “U of I” frequently mentioned Zorba, the name of the restaurant that was destroyed in a fire that day. “Tuition” was another big topic -- as U of I trustees were preparing to vote Thursday on a 6.9 percent tuition increase for incoming freshman.

After the erroneous alert, though, the most common words in tweets containing “U of I” were “sent,” “alert,” “talk” and “shooter.” The dramatically increasing slope of the line at about 12:00 shows a flurry of activity on twitter relating to the false alarm.

This is a similar chart, but specifically looks at tweets that had both “U of I” and “shooter” in the message. The chart doesn’t go back far enough to show 10:40 a.m., when the first alert was sent out, but the height at the beginning of the chart suggests a great deal of activity around that time.

The activity then tapers off at around 11:41, but then has an echo -- possibly relating to one or more major news outlets breaking news online -- which subsides at 12:38 p.m. There’s silence, then another bubble at 3:04 p.m., again possibly relating to a news update.

The next bubble comes at 4:53 p.m., which correlates to the time when U of I police sent out their long-awaited mass email on the situation, at which point the chart ends.

Shortly after the mass email about the mistake went out, I emailed Chicago Tribune reporters Liam Ford and Gerry Smith. At the time, Smith was using Twitter to locate students who were on campus during the false alert for a news story. Smith received my email, called, and asked about the climate around Champaign and Urbana (some of my response can be read in the Tribune story, in the final graphs).

The Trib reporter was most interested in the student response, which I told them was varied. Some students like myself read the “BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION” and knew it must have been an error, because the all-caps phrase seemed like a generic placeholder in a computer program that would have been replaced with a real building or intersection in the event of a real emergency. However, given the severity of the message, many students chose to err on the side of caution and treat the warning as credible. Their fears were evident in Twitter and SMS messages.

But the larger point, I told the Trib reporter, was the use (or abuse) of emergency alert messages at the U of I.

A team of 41 U of I students, myself included, created CampusCrime.net to gauge if alerts adequately reflected the status of crime on campus. We found that the alert system contributed to a climate of fear that did not reflect a minor uptick in crime on campus. Just one alert was distributed in 2006, while 34 were sent in 2010.

More than just a misconception about the volume of crimes occurring, the alerts also created misunderstandings about the source of crime and contributed to racial tension.

CampusCrime.net contributors were recently notified that they’d won a Region 5 “Mark of Excellence” award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

As I told the Trib reporter, the recent error was “totally unacceptable,” and was just the most recent demonstration that authorities need to better understand how mass-alerts can impact the campus, and perhaps should re-evaluate their use of the technology.

Funding Challenges, Long-term Aspirations of a Nonprofit Newsroom

2011-04-17T19:13:00.008-05:00

Shot of the newly-renovated KETC newsroom in St. Louis, Missouri. The building houses the St. Louis public television broadcaster, as well as the nonprofit online news organization the St. Louis Beacon. Photo from MagneticNorth.

You can’t mention a “model” for funding journalism without a can of mace these days. Mention the word, and you instantly become fodder for journalists, media tycoons, college professors, bloggers, SEO con artists and pretty much anyone with enough fingers to tweet.

Lately, the targets have been the newly-erected paywall at the New York Times and Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-exclusive app, The Daily. With the former, some suspect potential customers will be baffled and irked. With the latter, critics say Apple’s exorbitant fees and News Corp's cumbersome implementation may ultimately doom the enterprise. Other critics say both will fail long-term because they are dependent on closed, vertically-integrated systems that create artificial scarcity that simply does not exist in the rest of the digital world; and it only takes a short hop over the paywall or app store to find freer, greener pastures.

But before the Times and the Daily were whipping boys, nonprofit newsrooms were a popular whipping boy. MinnPost, the Voice of San Diego and ProPublica were the first of these newsrooms to garner nationwide attention. Some praised these operations for filling an enormous gap of coverage that commercial media left open, while others questioned whether it was wise to rely on handouts from a handful of wealthy donors to sustain journalism.

While the long-term prospects of those newsrooms remain to be seen, but they are still alive, vibrant, and producing journalism.

One of the lesser-known nonprofit newsrooms is the St. Louis Beacon. I recently had the opportunity to interview several people from that online news organization, including its founder.

Refugees of a consolidated media market

The Beacon is a nonprofit newsroom based in St. Louis Missouri, founded in 2007. There are eight editorial staff members, seven reporters, four staffers for business ops, two production assistants for web presentation, eleven board members, a chairman and a secretary-slash-treasurer.

The newsroom presents text-based news stories. Rarely, if ever, is there video or audio content. For the most part, it’s as close you can get to a newspaper without needing dead trees and ink. And that’s not just a technological choice, it’s also a content choice -- most of the stories are in a newspaper or newsweekly style, if sometimes a bit longer or thorough than most newspaper stories.

Number of active St. Louis papers, by year. Click to interact.

The St. Louis Media Market, like many metropolitan media markets, is highly consolidated. Many German-language newspapers thrived from the period of 1800-1900, including the Westliche Post, which was considered one of the finest German-American newspapers of the time, and the first paper that Joseph Pulitzer worked for. Around the time the German newspapers began to fold (possibly due to “assimilation” or Anglicization), the number of newspapers in St. Louis reached a peak of about 78 papers, after which consolidation hastened.

Six major newspapers (Post, Dispatch, Globe, Democrat, Star and Tribune) became three major newspapers (Post-Dispatch, Globe-Democrat, Star-Tribune). One of those closed in the 50s, another closed in the 80s, so that by 90s, there was just one major newspaper covering the metropolitan area.

Despite a rise in niche publications (such as business and ethnic newspapers), consolidation remains high. The Post-Dispatch by far has the highest circulation of any St. Louis newspaper (207k). While there are other newspapers in St. Louis, no one category of newspaper has more circulation than the Post-Dispatch.

Newsroom consolidation is an inevitable consequence of newspaper consolidation. When the Post-Dispatch was purchased by Iowa-based Lee Enterprises in 2005, it bought out 130 of the P-D staff. Among those to take the buyout was 34-year veteran Sunday editor Margaret Freivogel, who wanted to do something to increase the city’s news coverage in spite of layoffs.

A tree map visualization of the St. Louis newspaper market. Shows how the market breaks down by circulation, type and individual publication. Click to interact.

Around that time, the Voice of San Diego and MinnPost were beginning their nonprofit operations. Freivogel modeled her vision after those newsrooms. She received a grant from the Pulitzer family, who committed $500,000 so long as the Beacon could raise $1.5 million of their own money. The site officially launched in 2009, and has been expanding its news content and its news staff ever since.

According to DoLoop.com, stlbeacon.org generates 90,954 page views a month. It estimates at that level of traffic, the site could earn $571 a month in advertisements. For comparison, the Post-Dispatch receives 55 million page views a month, according to its Facebook page.

On being a nonprofit: relying on community engagement for your next meal

Community interaction through social media has been a goal of the Beacon since before it launched. It primarily uses the Public Insight Network, a database started by American Public Media. Readers are encourage to register in the network, and those registrants are asked questions about how a news topic has affected them, and what news topics they wish to learn more about.

The Beacon says this has two enormous benefits: it allows them to search for sources who are most relevant for a story, and helps them locate stories that might be under the local media’s radar.

“It’s to ask people to give information about what they already know and tell us what they’d like to know,” Freivogel said. “We used it both ways. Often times you’ll see that sources from the network have been used in our stories.”

Community interaction through partnerships helps the Beacon gain recognition. One of the longest, most continuous community partnership has been with the Missouri History Museum. Together, the Beacon and the Museum host town forums and lecture seminars on special topics.

The seminars focus on one topic for an entire year. In 2010, the topic was race relations in St. Louis. This year, the topic is class relations in St. Louis. Freivogel says it plays to the Beacon’s assets, particularly longer-form reporting and investigating beats that aren’t covered by commercial media, but are still relevant to the community’s well-being.

Said Freivogel: “We did what we do best, which is reporting on a subject and looking in-depth at something we feel like has a big impact on the community but wasn’t getting as much coverage that it deserved.”

How not to let money ruin your street cred

Sustainability is always one of the foremost goals of a nonprofit. In comparison to other nonprofits, the Beacon has a relatively wide range of options of how to fund its operation in the short and long-term. It is primarily funded by a handful of “big donors” (all of which are disclosed on the Beacon website -- and although the Beacon lists the ranges of the contributions, the exact dollar amounts are not disclosed), but is seeking to diversify its revenue stream in a number of ways.

Foremost, it wants to change from relying on major contributors to relying on more community with smaller donations. A common belief is that 20 percent of donors donate 80 percent of the revenue for a nonprofit, but Freivogel said it’s hard to rely on such large contributions from people year after year. Smaller, more dependable donors mean less revenue volatility over time.

“We’ll always be looking to donations, but we want to build up the number of small donations so we're not heavily dependent on large donors,” Freivogel said. “It’s far easier to sustain small donations than large donations year after year.”

Secondly, it wants to develop multiple streams of revenue besides donations. The Beacon is planning to use benefit concerts and other entertainment offerings to increase revenue. It’s also looking at producing book-length works of journalism and historical reference, which it would publish for money.

Freivogel said the Beacon will be seeking advertisers in the near future, and already advertises room for sponsorships on its website.

Objectivity has been a concern amongst critics who say that nonprofits might be subject to the political and ideological whims of large donors. Freivogel said she understands the concern, and that revenue diversification will help make sure that no one party has undue influence on the well-being of the Becon.

The concern is that the St. Louis community might perceive the Beacon as serving something other than the community: “We talk to all the donors about how the integrity of the journalism is really the most important thing and I think they understand that and realize that if we lose that, we lose our value to the community.”

Contenting with the outside forces, facing the competition

The Beacon also sees reporting on the outside forces that influences the community as a prerogative. To help with this, the nonprofit recently enlisted the help of a veteran journalist -- former longtime Washington correspondent for the Post-Dispatch, Robert Koenig.

“The Beacon is offering new perspectives in many areas, including the coverage of health care, the arts, and aspects of politics and government,” Koenig wrote in an email. “I was hired as the Washington correspondent last fall (Nov. 1) and I have tried to cover some news stories -- mostly with an impact on Missouri and Illinois -- that are not being covered well by other news organizations in the St. Louis region. I also have tried to bolster the Beacon's coverage of Illinois issues.”

The online news cycle has always been a challenge for all news organizations. The Beacon, for the most part, tries to ignore the pace of some popular blogs, preferring instead to sink time and money into comprehensive reports.

Said Koenig:

“When I worked at the old St. Louis Post-Dispatch (when it was still an evening paper), we used to joke that our news product's slogan should be: ‘Yesterday’s news, tomorrow.’ That, of course, has changed at traditional newspapers, where there is now more and more pressure to write blogs or file interim stories as quickly as possible. Here in Washington, the advent of Politico, The Daily Beast, and other fast-breaking news operations that are deploying many reporters to cover Congress and the federal agencies, is pressuring traditional news reporters to report “scoops” immediately rather than hold them for the newspaper deadline.”

But, he added, sometimes breaking news happens in Washington, and the Beacon publishes his work as soon as he writes it.

Nebraska Has The Most Fire-Prone Nuclear Plant in the U.S.

2011-03-24T16:37:00.001-05:00

While the international community focuses on Japan and its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the safety of which was seriously compromised following a massive earthquake, the United States has a renewed interest in the safety of nuclear power at home.

A probe into the safety of US nuclear plants, using data from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and data visualization software, suggests that America's plants are relatively safe overall, but that some power plants are more prone to incidents than others.

(Click the link to interact with the data on nuclear plant fires in the US on the IBM ManyEyes website)

The Cooper Nuclear Power Plant, near Brownville, Neb., has the worst record in the country when it comes to fire safety. From 1999 to 2009, it reported six significant fires to the NRC. The plant reported two other significant fires in 1996.

The plant makes Nebraska, which only has two nuclear plants (the other being Fort Calhoun, in Washington County), the state with the most nuclear plant fires in the past decade.

Additional NRC fire inspection reports show that the plant had 14 violations between 2000 and 2009. One of those violations included a "white" violation, "an issue with low to moderate increased importance to safety," where plant operators had improper procedures to safely shut down the plant in the event of a fire.

[Download the full spreadsheet of NRC fire inspections for this and all U.S. nuclear plants here]

"Between 1997 and June, 2007, the licensee failed to ensure that two emergency operating procedures which controlled activities affecting quality were appropriate to the circumstances," regulators reported. "Additionally, the licensee failed to properly verify and validate procedure steps to ensure that they would work to accomplish the necessary actions."

Other fire inspection violations included:

2006: Failures to Properly Control Combustibles in the Plant.

2004: Failure to ensure redundant safe shutdown systems located in the same fire area are free of fire damage.

2002: Failure to follow procedure resulting in a fire.

2001: Failure to install fire detectors in accordance with federal regulations.

In one 2009 inspection, NRC regulators made several findings about the safety of the plant, and noted an event where a maintenance tech tried to replace a leaky O-ring in a control valve hydraulic fitting, but used a wrong-sized part. This caused a leak at the plant, forcing operators to take the turbine off-line and shut down the reactor.

"The finding is more than minor because it adversely affected the configuration control attribute of the initiating events cornerstone, and adversely affected the cornerstone objective to limit the likelihood of those events that upset plant stability and challenge critical safety functions during shutdown as well as power operations, in that this finding resulted in a condition that prompted a plant
shutdown from 70 percent power," regulators wrote.

Meanwhile, the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD), which owns the Cooper plant, was among 16 nuclear energy providers who sued the Department of Energy (DOE) to stop collection of a nuclear waste fee.

According to the Lincoln, Neb. Journal Star, the DOE currently charges the providers 0.1 cents-per-kilowat to dispose of nuclear waste. But the plaintiffs argue that the DOE hasn't been complying with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and shouldn't have to pay the fee.

The Journal Star reported that NPPD built a $80 million storage facility at the Cooper plant to store spent fuel rods.

The suit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on March 8. The 9.0-magnitude Japan earthquake happened three days later. The Christian Science Monitor wrote that reports are emerging from international regulatory agencies about lax oversight of the Fukushima plant.

NPPD officials are confident about the plant's ability to withstand natural disasters. A recent Associated Press story quoted the NPPD spokesperson as saying the Cooper plant can withstand 300 mph winds, a 6.0-magnitude quake and a 1 million-year flood.

Reposted from The Horseshoe Blog.

Bias Against Public Media: The Case of Juan Williams

2011-01-14T21:00:00.001-06:00

The controversy surrounding Juan Williams, the Fox News contributor who lost his NPR contract after a racially insensitive statement aired in late October, re-ignited a debate in the mainstream media about whether the NPR should continue to receive public funding. This debate, however, was anything but fair, and revealed once more the longstanding bias that corporate media holds against public media. This report picks apart the coverage, and critically analyzes the philosophical roots of the imbalance.

A PDF version of this report includes citations, and is available here.

The mainstream media and public media produce content for the same audience, the American public, but differ in motives -- the former exists for profit margins, while the other exists for public enrichment. Given those basic differences, Juan Williams is an interesting case. As news analyst who was once employed simultaneously by National Public Radio and News Corporation-owned Fox News, Williams occupied space in both public and private realms, a position which often times inspired criticism. The root of this criticism, at least according to NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard, was that Williams appeared to slant his coverage depending on which media outlet he was working with at the time. “Williams tends to speak one way on NPR and another on Fox,” she wrote. The controversy reached a critical mass on October 20, when NPR terminated its contract with Williams, after the analyst made the following statement on the Fox News commentary program The O’Reilly Factor:

Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

NPR wrote in a press release that Williams’ comments on the Fox show had “undermined his credibility” as a news analyst with the public broadcaster, and his conduct was “inconsistent with [NPR] editorial standards and practices.” “The guidelines are based on the same news ethics guidelines of the Society of Professional Journalists, and are very similar to that of The New York Times and many other news organizations,” NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller told the Times. Schiller didn’t specify exactly which guidelines Williams had breached, though the SPJ code of ethics includes provisions for sensitivity in reporting information that could adversely affect people’s lives, appropriate representation of persons and cultures, and avoiding news distortion. It also advises journalists to prevent even a perceived conflict of interest and to disclose any conflicts should they arise.

It was not the first time Williams stoked controversy during his dual tenure at NPR and Fox News. On another episode of the O’Reilly Factor on January 26, 2009, Williams made a statement which the NPR Ombudsman, along with many members of the viewing audience, perceived as an attack against President Barack Obama’s wife:

Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going. If she starts talking, as Mary Katharine [Ham] is suggesting, her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim. If that stuff starts coming out, people will go bananas and she'll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross.

The incident prompted NPR’s Vice President of News, Ellen Weiss, to request that Williams remove his title of “NPR News Analyst” during Fox appearances, to which Williams complied. The NPR Ombudsman wrote that 378 listeners had written complaints to NPR in 2008 about Williams’ conduct on Fox, and the January 2009 incident alone generated 56 complaints. Nowhere does Shepard mention any complaints about Williams’ conduct on NPR. In sharp contrast, shortly after Williams’ termination for the October 2010 incident, thousands of complaints came to NPR, most of which originated from people who were not familiar with the public broadcaster and only filed complaints after learning of Williams’ firing from corporate media. Media attention was much higher than the previous incident, and the termination also prompted congressional representatives to threaten to defund public media and re-ignited a debate about the role of public media in a democratic society. For those who are unfamiliar with public media to harbor such strong resentment against it suggests that corporate media could be biased in its coverage of the Williams firing, and biased in its entire coverage of public media. As such, the Williams controversy provides a unique case to study corporate media’s representation of public media. Indeed, research and analysis of coverage reveals that corporate media frames public media in a negative light.

A LONG HISTORY OF CRITICIZING PUBLIC MEDIA’S PURPOSE

For a true understanding of the debate spawned by William’s departure from NPR, it’s necessary to view this episode as just one of the more recent critical discussions about public media’s place and purpose, and draw from previous arguments to give the debate and mainstream coverage additional context. First, not only do corporate and public media produce content for different reasons -- one for private gain, the other for societal gain -- but both also operate in separate philosophical realms. These realms were outlined in the classic work of media studies Four Theories of the Press, authored by Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, where the authors define these two realms as “Libertarian” and “Social Responsibility.” The former holds that humans are rational beings who, with the help of a press system unfettered by government intervention, can arrive at a universal truth through the marketplace of ideas. In this respect, media’s primary goal is to provide information pertaining to self-governance. A classic expression of libertarian theory came from William Peter Hamilton, the Wall Street Journal’s fourth editor, who famously said “A newspaper is a private enterprise owing nothing whatever to the public, which grants it no franchise. It is therefore affected with no public interest. It is emphatically the property of the owner, who is selling a manufactured product at his own risk.”

While the media’s purpose is very similar between libertarian theory and social responsibility theory, there is a marked difference in the premise of each theory.

Social responsibility theory is predicated on the notion that because of the fallibility of man, some authority must be vested in the government to ensure that truth-seeking is the primary goal of the media. It does not view the free market as a viable solution for all of society’s problems, and finds it may be necessary for the government to ensure equal access to the media. Social responsibility theory therefore recognizes a role for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio, while libertarian theory does not.

In describing the differences between the libertarian and social responsibility theories, the Four Theories authors came to the first fundamental criticism against public media: that under the libertarian theory of the press, government has no place. The authors conceded that libertarian theorists acknowledge the necessity of some state involvement in mass media, such as running the postal system which would allow the distribution of publications, but contended that minimal government intervention is the optimum solution. “[Libertarian theorists] were opposed to government support since it led to domination, and they trusted the capitalist system of private enterprise to find a way.” The theory finds that government involvement in the marketplace of ideas, therefore, would lead to domination of that marketplace and crowd out ideas that are more “competitive.” No consideration is given to the fact that public, government-funded media could allocate resources to deliver the kind of content that’s not commercially viable, yet has intrinsic value to an enlightened democratic society. The value of ideas in libertarian theory within a capitalist society is framed in relation to wealth-building, not knowledge-building, community-building or democracy-building.

The downfall of Siebert et al.’s reasoning is that they define freedom in the exact same way they defines the libertarian theory, which is to say the only condition of freedom is that the government has no control, i.e., libertarianism. On this note, Thomas Guback charged in Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press that Four Theories was inherently biased because of its framing press freedom in terms of how little the government “stays out of media ownership, operation and regulation.” “Since the book adopts the worldview of one of the theories it presumes to examine, the book biases its own case and necessarily concludes that any system that does not measure up to this worldview lacks freedom,” Guback wrote in 1995.

At about the same time Guback and others had their criticism of Four Theories’ views on libertarian theory published, Congress slashed funding to NPR, much thanks to the efforts of libertarians and conservatives. Media critical theorist Bob McChesney wrote that this attack on public media greatly resembled the attacks of 1934, which he refers to as “Dark Ages of U.S. public broadcasting” for the collapse of the American broadcast reform movement. This was the period when Congress established the Federal Communications Commission, and with that came a host of legislation that ensured corporate media dominance of the public airwaves. During the lead-up to legislation, lobbyists representing corporate media interests argued that the “capitalist media are synonymous with democratic media and that democratic media are synonymous with American media,” and any alternative would constitute a “threat to democracy and the U.S. Constitution.” This set a tone for discourse about public media that exists to this day. “Since 1935, all broadcast and communication policy debates have been predicated upon the notion that the needs of the private sector come first, and that these are largely compatible with the public interest,” McChesney wrote.

The ramifications of this ideological view followed public media all the way to the founding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which all but ensured that public media would occupy an obscure space between societal relevance and commercial irrelevance. Because the public electromagnetic spectrum was primarily dedicated to commercial interests, the portion of spectrum dedicated to public interests was limited and distributed so as not to “threaten the existing or potential profitability of commercial interests.” This gave the CPB the task of providing cultural content that was not profitable, did not challenge the status quo (namely, the capitalist system and corporate press), and most importantly, did not meet the informational needs or represent the views of the vast majority of the American public. Its obscurity also made it an easy target for conservative critics, who had already blocked European-style taxation to fund the beleaguered public media system, and pointed to its ineffectiveness as reason to cut funding even further. The reasoning is analogous to de-clawing a cat and blaming it for being an inadequate mouser.

NPR has always been a victim of bullying at the Congressional level -- especially at the hands of libertarian and conservative lawmakers who renew attacks whenever public broadcasting produces content that does not align with their ideologies. Richard Nixon vetoed CPB funding in 1972 to quash dissenting viewpoints, as did Ronald Reagan in 1980 to eliminate opposition to libertarian marketplace ideology. Bob Dole (R.-Kansas) claimed that public broadcasting was a source of “unrelenting liberal cheerleading,” while Newt Gingrich (R.-Georgia), one of the most vocal opponents of public media, called public broadcasting a “sandbox for the rich,” and said he would “privatize them all.” In turn, these messages are turned into content and published by corporate media. And apart from the pursuit for cultural and ideological hegemony, public media has been used as a pawn for political advantages, as conservatives have attacked it as a cheap way of gaining political advantage.

It’s important to recognize that criticism of public media isn’t exclusive to the libertarian theory of the press. Criticism of public media, and especially NPR, also comes from the social responsibility theory of the press, insomuch that NPR is not a truly public system, and therefore may not operate in the public interest. The U.S. government provides only 15 percent of the revenues for public broadcasting, forcing NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service to scrounge for private and corporate handouts. This leaves public broadcasters in a precarious position where they are vulnerable to the influence of commercial underwriters, which threatens the mission to conduct journalism for the public good, and may skew coverage to benefit only a small portion of the American public. McChesney wrote, “When the federal subsidy is fully eliminated, the bias toward corporate interests and an upper-income target audience will be magnified.” This problem is readily recognized by media and communications experts in Europe, where governments fully subsidize public media systems (and subsidize those systems with much more funding) and “PBS-style system” is all but a pejorative term.

THE CASE OF JUAN WILLIAMS

Juan Williams provided a convenient news peg for corporate media to re-ignite the discussion about the relevance (or lack thereof) of public media. As it played out, the discussion was all but one-sided. On Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor, where the controversy began, the host called NPR an “outfit” and its President and CEO Vivian Schiller a “pinhead,” and said “In my opinion, Ms. Schiller should resign immediately because she is simply not smart enough to run a media company.” O’Reilly’s hour-long show didn’t include any opposing viewpoints, save an 18-second clip of Schiller defending her decision, which was introduced by O’Reilly declaring the NPR head a coward for not appearing in-person on his program. When interviewed on a separate Fox News program, he called for legislation to end all public financing of NPR, saying “We’re going to freeze it down, so they don’t get any more money. This is outrageous.”

On the news network’s show Hannity, which aired later that evening, host Sean Hannity featured two guests, both of whom not only criticized NPR’s decision to fire Williams, but also took the moment to question NPR’s very existence. Bob Beckel, the Fox News commentator, USA Today columnist and the manager of the 1984 Walter Mondale presidential campaign, said “I think this thing is so illiberal, so wrong, so politically correct, that it gives the impression of those of us on the left, and there are a lot of us by the way who agree with me on this, I think I can speak for a lot of liberals tonight, that we find what NPR did to be outrageous, atrocious, and well, well out of bounds.” Beckel later commented that he had never heard of any previous conflicts between Williams and NPR, and neither the host nor the other commentator, who was another Fox News analyst, took air time to address the 2009 incident or any previous incidents. The other analyst, Dana Perino, who was formerly the press secretary for George W. Bush, charged that NPR was biased because it wouldn’t have ended Williams’ contract if he had made disparaging comments about conservative activists, and in particular questioned the existence of public media, saying: “The way that NPR has handled this is so ham-handed, that I think it has done irreparable damage to its name.” Hannity prefaced the segment by asking of the commentators, “Isn’t that the bigger issue here that liberals do not want free speech in America?”

Fox’s Special Report that same day hosted three panelists, none of whom agreed with NPR’s decision. The closest voice to neutral was that of The Washington Post’s Nia-Malika Henderson, who said nothing of the content of Williams’ comment and instead framed the controversy as human resource politics, thereby shifting the blame to NPR, saying, “One of the underlying things is just that he was in a very precarious position from the point of view of his bosses.” Meanwhile, the text on the screen read “Left, Right Come to Williams’ Defense.” Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer echoed libertarian sentiment about the accessibility of a free marketplace for media and ideas, albeit with a modern twist: “Even in the absence of this travesty, you have to ask why in a world where you have infinite media outlets of every expression of every kind, internet, broadcasting, are we subsidizing anybody here,” he said, “because obviously, the opportunity is open to almost anyone.” He doesn’t go on to mention the kind of capital necessary to launch a digital news startup, although the annual budget for the MinnPost nonprofit news website in Minneapolis is $1.3 million (a price which covers the expense of five full-time employees and 40 part-time employees). VoiceofSanDiego employs 11 full-time reporters on a budget of nearly $800,000. Neither of those operations have long-term financial stability. Journalism isn’t as cheap as the Fox commentators would make it appear.

A day later, on Fox and Friends, commentator Steve Doocy stated NPR “does lean to the left” in an interview with Johnson County Community College professor Mark Browning. Browning, who had an opinion piece published in the New York Post (which, like Fox News Channel, is also owned by the News Corp multinational media conglomerate), argued that NPR should be made into a 501(c)(4) organization “like National Rifle Association or MoveOn.org,” so that it might “decide to play a more even-handed game of journalism.” “[NPR] cater[s] to a particular segment of the population, and if they're not going to represent the entire segment of the population, they ought to be so categorized,” Browning said on Fox and Friends, to which Doocy quickly replied, “Label it as such, all right. Interesting stuff.”

A reoccurring theme in the Fox broadcasts on Nov. 21 and 22, besides a blanket statement made about NPR’s objectivity based on a single incident and the sanctity of libertarian, free-market solutions to media coverage, was the insistence of Juan Williams’ innocence as a bigot. And because Williams served dual roles as an NPR and Fox News analyst, Fox had a special privilege in knowing Williams personally. The statements about Williams’ character, however, are made in a manufactured news environment where no ideological diversity exists. At no point was a Muslim consulted to get a unique perspective on the controversy, nor was cultural sensitivity considered an appropriate topic for discussion. To begin to formulate the idea of bigotry, there must first have been an adequate representation of ideas ranging from indifference to outrage at Williams’ statement, and then the viewer would be permitted to come to a conclusion about his innocence or lack thereof. Interestingly, this can be viewed as a flaw within libertarian press theory, at least in how it exists for Fox News: A libertarian marketplace of ideas is supposed to produce universal truth because of a combination of unrestricted resources and unfettered competition, but a news outlet which slants its coverage to promote that very ideology necessarily censors itself from anything but libertarian ideology, thus limiting the scope of views and tainting the marketplace of ideas. The framing of Williams’ firing, as Hannity had put it, as a muzzling of free speech is also of dubious logic, given Fox News’ decision to restrict the debate so narrowly.

Derision of NPR’s firing of Williams was universal across News Corp-owned news products. “At least one good thing has come out of National Public Radio's firing of Juan Williams,” wrote Seth Lipsky, the founding editor of the New York Sun in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “NPR’s vice president had barely hung up the phone after informing Mr. Williams that he was being terminated—and refusing to meet with him, a long-time colleague, to discuss the matter—when the calls began for Congress to cut off funding for NPR entirely.” As a media entrepreneur, Lipsky took issue with the government creating more competition in the media ecosystem, and reported that on more than one occasion that he had been dismissed by a potential media investor because the market was saturated with public media content. Lipsky specifically urged against suggestions made by the former Washington Post editor Leonard Downy, who in his report for the Columbia School of Journalism, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” urged for more public subsidy of media. “How badly would that chill the capital markets for those who dream of privately funded news gathering, completely independent of oversight by Congress? My guess is that the effect would be a great deal more significant than those who have not been out trying to raise such capital might imagine,” Lipsky wrote. But he offered no solutions on how to revive a news product which the free market has deemed unfit for production, and which the public has deemed unfit for consumption. Rather, he seemed to suggest American society should have a corporate press system or no press system at all.

Another opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal declared, “They finally found a way to get rid of Juan Williams.” The editorial insisted that because of the outrageousness of firing a person for admitting they get nervous when boarding a plane along with a person in traditional Muslim attire, there must have been some other reason for the firing which had not been made available to the public. “It has long been one of the most open secrets in the world of punditry (which needless to say, includes NPR’s ‘analysts’), that NPR’s progressive political base was unhappy with Mr. Williams’s appearances on Fox as existentially incompatible with their worldview,” it said, without giving any citation of sources, or references to any other incidents. Its conclusion was that the “true” reason for Williams’ departure was his political stripe, not any potentially racist comments, again implying a large-scale, left-wing bias in NPR.

Outside of the News Corp media sphere, coverage was not as sharply slanted, but still lacked the texture and nuance of a complete debate. The New York Times editorial board called NPR’s move “ham-handed,” but was careful to note the broadcaster’s shoestring budget, and rejected claims of bias: “When all is said and done — no small challenge for modern media — anyone who listens regularly to NPR news and its local stations can hear the due diligence to fairness in its reports.”

In Portland’s The Oregonian, Sunday columnist Elizabeth Hovde wrote that NPR was unbiased on the whole, but that the firing exposed a “double standard” for the public broadcaster, and an opportunity wasted. “Williams furthered a discussion about visceral reactions and stereotypes in a post-9/11 world,” she wrote. “His comments presented a teachable moment, not a firing offense.” Despite disagreeing with the firing, she considered NPR a “noble expenditure.”

The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier drew comparisons to Daniel Schorr, the Watergate reporter who once leaked a secret Central Intelligence Agency document which shone light on illegal practices and who went to work for NPR in 1985. “Schorr once told USA Today about working for NPR: ‘I have breathed the breath of freedom. Nobody ever told me here what not to do,’” the editorial board of the McClatchy-Tribune paper wrote. “Apparently that freedom did not extend to Juan Williams.” The paper also said “commentators on both sides of the spectrum” came to Williams’ defense, but only cited The View's Whoopi Goldberg as one such commentator from the left end of the spectrum.

Some did come to the defense of NPR, including Philadelphia Enquirer columnist George E. Curry, who happened to be a former commentator on NPR. Curry took exception to the idea that Williams’ firing constituted a desecration of free speech, and drew from his own experiences of his departure from NPR. “Juan Williams, a frequent critic of federal entitlements, is not entitled to a job at NPR or anywhere else. And NPR has done nothing to curtail his freedom of speech. Its executives have decided they no longer want his services, as is their right. It’s a question of fee speech, not free speech.”

Few media outlets were sensitive of cultural issues surrounding the William’s controversy, and the representation of Muslims in mainstream media. However, a notable exception to this was The Washington Tri-City Herald editorial board, which quoted a local Imam reminding his community that there were no Muslim voices on national broadcasting outlets, or national Muslim stations to offer a positive, national viewpoint on Muslims. The Herald also did not let Williams off lightly, writing “He is not just an innocent victim and also shares responsibility for this new controversy over Muslims and their portrayal in the media.”

But perhaps most telling aspect of the media coverage was a dearth of reaction to two particular news events revolving around Fox. First, on Dec. 17, media reporter Howard Kurtz published an encounter he had with Fox News Chief Roger Ailes, where Ailes called the public broadcaster ‘Nazis’:

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

Shortly after the story was published, Ailes wrote a letter of apology to the Jewish activist group Anti-Defamation League. Just one month earlier, Ailes’ employer, Rupert Murdoch, accepted an award from same organization, for “stalwart support of Israel and his commitment to promoting respect and speaking out against anti-Semitism.” Ailes’ comment did not draw much media attention, and much less attention than the original Williams controversy. One of the few media outlets to report the story was NPR, which covered the media Fox’s use of Nazi imagery across its programming.

Second, before Ailes made his ‘Nazi’ comments, he extended an offer to Juan Williams for a $2 million, three-year contract. While it was mentioned briefly in reportage of the episode, few media sources found it notable that a major news organization made a lucrative deal with a controversial reporter who had just been sacked by another national news organization for a racially-insensitive comment. This furthered the argument about there being a mainstream press bias, as ignoring the two major story points solidified an acceptance of libertarian, partisan viewpoints and rejected the notion that what transpired was anything but the preferred outcome of an ideal media system.

FUNDING, DIVERSITY AS AN ANTIDOTE TO BIAS

The previous accounts of media coverage on Juan Williams’ dismissal from NPR are not all-inclusive. There are many more opinions on the issue than the papers in circulation or stations on the electromagnetic spectrum or channels on satellite or cable television. The point in any case study is to collect enough data as to identify a clear, cohesive trend; or, where the data shows no clear trend, then an admission that no conclusion can be reached. The trend in this study is clear: mainstream media coverage of the episode revealed bias in the system.

Diversity in the range of opinions is an obvious antidote. But how that antidote is to be administered may not be so obvious. Because it was the corporate press system that took part in biased coverage of the Williams incident, there is no weight to the libertarian press theory’s assertion that the corporate press can provide enough diversity in coverage for future incidents. Another source of diversity is needed.

On commenting on the Williams episode, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting proposed just the opposite of what critics suggested happen to NPR. Instead of cutting funding off, FAIR recommended that funding for NPR and PBS be increased, so that it could live up to its original expectations. “Public broadcasting should be pushed, of course--to live up to the high-minded ideals that established these systems in the first place, not to please conservative politicians or to serve up programming that corporate underwriters want to bring to the airwaves,” the media watchdog wrote. To put it another way, to muster an appropriate counter-argument to libertarian press theory and the corporate press, public media requires more muscle. Adequate funding for public media is the only viable solution to solve issues of media bias, and is the only way to realize the potential of public media and thwart the efforts to destroy it.

One Final Note:

The controversy is notable not only because it reveals bias in the commercial media system, but also because of the critical moment at which it happened. This is a critical moment in two respects: At a time when commercial media is cutting its investment in journalism, public media has an increased responsibility to support investigative journalism. Also, economic distress in the private sector has hurt public media's fund raising efforts and reinvigorated conservative lawmakers' efforts to aggressively cut public programs. The critical moment, therefore, is an intersection where public media's coverage mattered the most, and when it was weakest. The Williams controversy provided those same conservative lawmakers with a convenient weak point to attack public media, at occurred at time when public media could hardly defend itself.

Black Friday isn't what you think it is.

2010-11-27T12:00:00.001-06:00

Activist-artists from the "Buy More Stuff!" campaign make ironic performance art in Seattle on Black Friday 2009. Picture by Michael Holden.

It wasn’t but two years ago on Black Friday that newsmakers frothed at the headline: “Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death.”

The New York Times described a mob of more than 2,000 shoppers who broke through the sliding-glass doors of a Valley Stream, New York Wal-Mart, storming the store and killing an employee:

“Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said.

Some workers who saw what was happening fought their way through the surge to get to Mr. Damour, but he had been fatally injured, the police said. Emergency workers tried to revive Mr. Damour, a temporary worker hired for the holiday season, at the scene, but he was pronounced dead an hour later at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream.

Four other people, including a 28-year-old woman who was described as eight months pregnant, were treated at the hospital for minor injuries.”

Since then, retailers have employed more advanced methods of crowd control, and since the economic downturn, media attention has shifted from the sheer spectacle of rabid shoppers to Black Friday sales as an economic barometer. It’s customary for commercial news to frame the history of black Friday with such unattributed claims as: “It’s commonly held to have its origin in retailers counting on the crowds of shoppers and a surge in sales to push them into the ‘black,’ or profitability, for the year.” The history and reality of Black Friday is more complex than commercial news media care to look into.

The first Black Friday was May 18, 1688, when James II of England imprisoned seven bishops who opposed The Declaration of Indulgence, a proclamation from the king suspending the penal laws which forced his subjects to conform to the Church of England. The bishops were tried and released.

The second Black Friday came Sept. 24, 1869, when two speculators tried to manipulate and corner the American gold market and succeeded in temporarily depreciating the country’s currency. It was the first large-scale economic panic in the United States.

Since then, the title of “Black Friday” has been used to memorialize a fishing disaster, the hanging of accused bombers in the Haymarket affair, a rally for women’s suffrage, a riot in Glasgow over worker’s rights, a killer brushfire in Australia, various battles during World War II, a riot at a Warner Bros. Studio, and other calamitous events.

An illustration of the Haymarket affair.

Philadelphia police most likely coined the name, in reference to the Friday after Thanksgiving, circa 1966, due to “massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks.” Retailers understood Black Friday as a pejorative term, and at first, dismissed it. From a 1985 Philadelphia Inquirer:

“The caller wanted to know about retail sales at Hess's department store in Allentown on Black Friday. But the question touched a sensitive nerve for Irwin Greenberg, chairman of the chain.

"That's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," snapped Greenberg.

Retail sales?

No, he steamed, the term Black Friday.

"Black Friday is a phrase that's sinful and it's disgusting," a perturbed Greenberg said.

"Why would anyone call a day, when everyone is happy and has smiles on their faces, Black Friday?" he asked.

Greenberg, a 30-year veteran of the retail trade, says it is a Philadelphia expression. "It surely can't be a merchant's expression," he said.”

Retailers adapted to this change in the vernacular by spinning the meaning of Black Friday. From the same Inquirer story:

“A more accepted explanation among merchants, however, is that the black in Black Friday refers to profits. With a windfall of earnings coming in during the Christmas season, it is a day when the number crunchers for retailers can put down their red pencils and start using their black pencils to write profits into ledgers.”

That’s why it’s called Black Friday, and that’s why it’s now framed in the media as such. But what of its meaning and importance, and is “Black Friday” the right name for the day from an economic perspective?

It’s an interesting question, because if retail sales don’t actually “go into the black,” then it’s a misnomer. If it’s true that retailers only begin making a profit starting on the Friday after Thanksgiving, then that’s quite remarkable, because the entire American retail economy exists only because of a consumerist tradition piggy-backed on a religious holiday.

To make the determination whether Black Friday is actually the savior of the retail sector requires sales data from the whole year, and preferably, data from several years to resolve any potential outliers.

Some retailers may not actually reach profits in a particular year, as retailers are subject to economic forces beyond holidays. But the question wasn’t if retailers necessarily go into the black, but rather if the likelihood is greater to profit on Black Friday. The mythology of Black Friday doesn’t require all retailers to reach profits, or even most. So, rather than looking at profits, we look at potential profits -- meaning sales. The U.S. Census Bureau has the figures, and they look something like this:

What this chart shows is estimated total retail sales, excluding motor vehicle and parts dealers, for each month of the year from January 2006 to December 2009, in millions of dollars. For instance, the Census estimates consumers spent $221,080 million, or $221 billion in January 2008, and $313,045 million in December 2009, a.k.a $313 billion.

The trend is an increase in sales from February to May, followed by declining sales from March to September. Then, an uptick in spending in the months of October, November and December. There’s a drop-off in January when consumers spend less money than any other time, and the cycle repeats.

The trend would suggest that, yes, the holiday season has an impact on sales. But to find what the holiday shopping season really means to retailers, we have to find and isolate holiday shopping from the rest of the sales figures. The National Retail Federation pays for that kind of research, and found that winter holiday spending eclipsed all other holidays and events combined:

Americans spent $447.1 billion on the “Winter Holidays” in 2009, or about the GDP of Poland, the 21st richest country in the world, ahead of Sweden but behind Belgium.

Holiday shopping is a big chunk of the retail economy, but is it enough to say that Black Friday is actually the moment when a profit is first realized? Looking at the data, it is conceivable. For the 2009 Black Friday weekend, NRF estimated that consumers spent $41.2 billion. That’s about 9 percent of all holiday sales. On the Friday alone, shoppers spent $18.6 billion, or 4 percent of all holiday purchases.

So, not only do sales go up for the Winter Holidays, Winter Holiday spending dwarfs spending on any other holiday, and it’s particularly important on Black Friday. Taking that data and comparing it to the total spent in retail, we find about 20 percent, or one-fifth, of all American retail commerce is related to Winter Holidays.

Because retailers are in a constant tug-of-war between consumers and suppliers, the profit margin is thin, relative to other sectors. Wal-Mart’s net profit margin over the last five years was 3.5 percent. Best Buy’s profit margin over the same period was 3.1 percent. Meanwhile, Macy’s hasn’t made it out of the red over the past five years and has an average net profit margin of -0.9 percent. Slash 20 percent from revenue, and the consequences are obvious.

A retail economy could exist without a Christmas. That’s not being debated. The point is that the retail economy, in its current state, would cease to exist without Winter Holiday shopping. It requires a profitable holiday to exist. This realization is all the more interesting when considering the nature of holiday purchases, which underpins that economy of gift-giving and holiday-celebrating.

Many of the purchases are actually useless, things bought by people for acquaintances who they haven’t the slightest clue how to gift for. As a result, a large number of purchases are made without any real consideration, and thus the American retail economy exists mainly to provide gifters things that giftees, and anyone for that matter, don’t really want or need. The fact that magazine articles, feature stories and numerous websites exist solely for the purpose of finding “the perfect gift” for someone illustrates this dilemma, as the act of wanting foremost requires awareness.

This is not only inefficient, since it focuses the economy on the production of goods with dubious practicality, but it also damages the economy by destroying value. This was the idea behind a 1993 paper by the economist Joel Waldfogel, who surveyed his undergraduate students at Yale to find the difference between the retail value of the gifts they received during the holidays and the value of satisfaction the students experienced from the gifts. His findings:

“While it is possible for a giver to choose a gift which the recipient ultimately values above its price -- for example, if the recipient is not perfectly informed -- it is more likely that the gift will leave the recipient worse off than if she had made her own consumption choice with an equal amount of cash... respondents estimate that friends and family paid an average $438 for the recipients’ total gifts, but respondents express a willingness to pay only $313, on average, for the same gifts.”

Waldfogel came to the conclusion that in the gift-giving process, one-third the value of the gift is lost due to the difference between price and satisfaction. He expanded on this research and turned it into a book, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays.

What the economist was actually measuring was “deadweight loss,” which is what happens when an economic loss by one party is not offset by a gain to another party. Another way to think of this is when a person burns up a $100 bill -- she or he is $100 poorer, but no one is richer. In Waldfogel’s words, gift-giving works like this:

“Normally, when I buy things for myself, I'll only spend $100 on myself, if I find a thing that’s worth more than $100 to me. But if you’re buying something for me, if you’re spending $100 on me, you don't really know what I have, you don’t really know what I like, you run the risk of buying something I wouldn’t be willing to pay anything for. Now, of course, you might do quite well, but on average, you might do quite poorly, and that’s what the data is showing.”

Waldfolgel said while he enjoyed the sentiment of holiday-gift giving, his research lead him to believe the practice was “an orgy of value destruction and misallocated resources.” He encourages the purchase of specific gifts as long as the purchaser is fully aware of the recipient’s wants and needs, but otherwise says it makes more economic sense to distribute gift cards for the Holidays.

There is a counter-point to all of this: for all the importance the media places on Black Friday and the Holiday shopping season, there are signs that it doesn’t amount to much in the grand economic scheme of things. Writer and economic commentator Charles Hugh Smith, on www.oftwominds.com, noted that the retail sector only accounts for 7.9 percent of the entire American GDP, and Winter Holiday shopping accounts for 3.4 percent of the economy.

“My Christmas wish to Santa: please let this be the last Christmas in America that is dominated by the propaganda that holiday retail sales have any more impact on the $14.7 trillion U.S. economy than a moldy, half-eaten fruitcake left over from 2007,” he writes.

Smith argues that because holiday shopping is such a small portion of the overall economy, that the media obsession over retail performance on Black Friday is unwarranted. Nevertheless, extrapolating Waldfolgel’s analysis on the deadweight loss of holiday gifting, Winter Holiday shopping presents about a 1.1 percent, or $156.8 billion hit to the economy.

For comparison, if America’s deadweight loss were a country, it would have the 48th largest economy in the world -- somewhere between the Philippines and Kuwait. The UK spends $190 billion annually on healthcare, while Canada spends $167 billion.

Yes, although it earned its name for other reasons, Black Friday is about “getting into the black,” and is a pretty big deal to retailers. But the media’s obsession with this retail behemoth is both unwarranted and distracts from more relevant issues, namely the inefficiency of the American economy and how to improve the situation.

Despite Supreme Court Ruling, We Still Need Broadcast Regulations.

2010-07-20T15:00:00.001-05:00

In a recent editorial, the New York Times lead readers to believe that due to technological advances, the Federal Communications Commission should lift free speech regulations on radio and television broadcasters. However, those readers are due some proper context, as that argument opens the door to some disastrous ideas about how to manage the public airspace.

Some background on the story behind the editorial: the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York (CASCNY) declared that the three-decade old FCC regulations on fining radio and television broadcasters for airing expletives was unconstitutional, writing: “the FCC’s policy violates the First Amendment because it is unconstitutionally vague, creating a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here.”

With laws passed by congress and signed by President Bush, the FCC tightened regulations on content in 2006, after Janet Jackson exposed her breast to millions watching a Super Bowl halftime show, and several high-profile celebrities used profanities during televised award shows. The price of an FCC fine for indecency increased tenfold, up to $325,000 per incident. This prompted Fox Television Stations, Inc. to sue the FCC in April 2006, claiming the commission’s policies violated the First Amendment.

CASCNY agreed with Fox, and wrote in June 2007 that the FCC “must provide a reasoned basis” for the changes it makes to its policies regarding indecent language. The Department of Justice then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), which overturned the previous ruling, writing that FCC’s decision wasn’t made arbitrarily. But SCOTUS didn’t make a decision whether the FCC’s regulations violated the First Amendment and returned the case to CASCNY to make that determination.

CASCNY made its decision July 13. While the court said the current policy was unconstitutional, it concluded that the FCC could develop a policy regulating content that did not violate the First. According to the Times story, legal experts believe the DoJ will appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Times lauded the appeals court’s decision:

“But a common-sense communications policy should not stop at indecency. The Supreme Court, if it takes up the case, should end all government regulations on the content of broadcasts.”

The Times seem to be headed for a fundamentalist interpretation of the First Amendment. But instead of justifying deregulation with absolute free speech, the Times forgo that low-hanging fruit in favor of more sophisticated reasoning. The next immediate graph plunged the argument into some murky depths:

“Technological change has undermined any justification for limiting the First Amendment rights of broadcast media outlets but not others.”

Granted, the Times only and explicitly argued the FCC stop regulating content over the airwaves -- not stop regulating the rights (licenses) to broadcast on public airwaves. Ownership regulations and other financial limits should be preserved, the Times added. But it began to formulate an argument that because of the internet and the communications revolution, it’s unjust for the FCC to exercise its regulatory authority. In a nutshell, the argument is: “anything is accessible on cable television or the internet nowadays, so it’s not fair to put rules on broadcasters.”

The Times cited Judge Clarence Thomas in an attempt to give the claim some legitimacy. Thomas made the same argument in a concurring, but separate opinion in a related case in 2009:

“… Even if this Court’s disfavored treatment of broadcasters under the First Amendment could have been justified at the time [they were enacted]…dramatic technological advances have eviscerated the factual assumptions underlying those decisions. Broadcast spectrum is significantly less scarce than it was 40 years ago.”

To buy into these ideas is to neglect the history of the FCC and why it was created. The Communications Act of 1934 created the Commission and gave it the purpose:

“…of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications…”

Note the emphasis to regulate access, “so far as possible to all the people of the United States.” One could interpret “all the people” as analogous to “public,” meaning the airspace is public property. Indeed, SCOTUS had the same interpretation of the Communications Act when it ruled in Red Lion v FCC in 1969 that because the radio spectrum was a scarce, public space, radio stations could be regulated by a “fairness doctrine,” or that “each side of those issues must be given fair coverage.”:

“Before 1927, the allocation of frequencies was left entirely to the private sector, and the result was chaos. It quickly became apparent that broadcast frequencies constituted a scarce resource whose use could be regulated and rationalized only by the Government. Without government control, the medium would be of little use because of the cacophony of competing voices, none of which could be clearly and predictably heard. Consequently, the Federal Radio Commission was established to allocate frequencies among competing applicants in a manner responsive to the public ‘convenience, interest, or necessity.’”

The phrasing here makes it clear that the decision was made not only because the spectrum was scarce, but because the spectrum belonged to the American people. And it fell upon the FCC, whose authority is vested by the United States Government, the democratic body elected by the people and for the people, to make sure that these airwaves remained the right of the American people, and therefore managed in a democratic fashion.

Instead of acknowledging this history of the FCC as a caretaker of public space, something which continues to have relevance, the Times chose to frame that regulatory body as something of a dinosaur:

“The government originally began regulating the content of broadcasts when the networks were the only game in town, watched in huge numbers by Americans in the days before cable television and the Internet.”

Broadcast is still an important medium. Strictly from an economic perspective, broadcast advertising was a $41.8 billion market in 2009, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising. Broadcast television alone outstripped all other advertising markets, including cable television, internet and newspapers. Americans still spend significantly more time with television than any other medium, according to the most recent TVB study, and reaches 90% of adults over age 18. Broadcast television, in particular, remains the dominant source for local news.

But while the digital conversion opened up the 700 MHz frequency and allowed radio and television broadcasters the ability to multicast channels, it has not suddenly created more spectrum. In actuality, the FCC mandate reduced the amount of broadcasting spectrum available to television and radio broadcasters by 25%. And the radio spectrum is still finite, even if it is used more efficiently.

But more to the point, the spectrum still belongs to the people, and should be regulated as such. As the Environmental Law Institute, an independent research and education center advocating environmental protection through law, policy, and management, reported, it is a natural resource and should be given special status considering its scarcity:

“Based on the assertions of the Court, the president, and academics, it can safely be concluded that the policy of the U.S. government is that the electromagnetic spectrum is a scarce natural (and national) resource... In spite of this highly unusual consensus throughout different layers of government and academia, the government does not treat the spectrum like other natural resources.”[2]

“If the electromagnetic spectrum is a natural resource— which most experts believe it to be—then it should be managed more like one. Instead of recognizing this resource as such, the United States and countries in Europe relegate the management and supervision of this natural resource to technocrats who deal with telecommunications and speech. Of course the spectrum as a natural resource has other crossovers that do not exist in other resources; it is a medium for communication, and the FCC’s role in supervising content may still be relevant.”[5]

Even in the Networked era, broadcast ownership remains a relevant topic. Under the pretense of tech advances, limits on the number of radio stations a single entity can own were repealed in 1996, to calamitous results. Between the deregulation of 1996 and 2003, there was a 5.9 percent increase in the number of radio stations, but a 35 percent drop in radio owners, according to an FCC report. Another FCC report in 2004 found that consolidation hurt news coverage in local markets. More recent studies showed the social toll of deregulation: the probability that a particular station is owned by a minority or a female is significantly lower in concentrated markets.

The argument that the FCC should stop regulating broadcaster’s content because of technological change has considerable danger. To say that technological advancements undermine any justification for certain regulations is to say that they undermine justification for any regulation. The appeals court decision should not be used as a precedent to undermine the FCC’s stewardship of the people’s airwaves.

Image “Visual Simile Symbol Icon Echoes - La Antena,” by Dominic Alves, is used in accordance with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Why a Communication Revolution Needs a Human Rights Revolution

2010-07-05T14:00:00.001-05:00

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” - Article 19, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.

When people talk about human rights, freedom inevitably dominates the conversation. Freedom from being restrained and beaten is a human right. Freedom from toiling under another without just compensation is a human right. So, too, is freedom from being held arbitrarily and indefinitely.

Human empathy makes those rights concrete. Sympathy allows us to understand why it’s important to be safe from beatings and slavery. Yet, there’s another kind of human right which is not understood as well, but is just as important.

In Burma, journalists face death for exposing the cruelty of the military junta, and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi remains under a decades-long house arrest. In Sri Lanka, a news editor is assassinated and reporters receive death threats for uncovering war crimes. A young blogger in Egypt, known for revealing police corruption, is dragged out of an internet café and beaten to death. Iran holds 47 journalists in prisons, while it airs coerced confessions daily on state television. At last count, 136 journalists remain in jail across the globe. These actions block the flow of information and ideas and constitute a desecration of human rights.

Problems aren’t limited to the East. In the West, organizations can’t purchase equal time on the ostensibly public Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to air messages that challenge consumerism. Front-groups for major corporations manufacture propaganda to tilt elections. Media barons threaten to dismantle the beleaguered media system in the United States, cutting staff from already bare-bones newsrooms, pursuing maximum profit at the expense of public awareness. Public media is woefully underfunded and must routinely “pass the hat” to keep the lights on. And amidst a communications revolution, a handful of telecommunications giants plot to limit people’s access to information based on the contents of their wallets.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the most widely translated document in the world and is the basis for international law on human rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, who spearheaded the creation of the Declaration and later chaired the UN Human Rights Commission, in a speech following the vote that adopted the Declaration, said: “This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the proclamation of the Declaration of the Rights of the Man by the French people in 1789, the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the United States, and the adoption of comparable declarations at different times in other countries.”

There are 30 articles that make up the Declaration. The first two articles form the basis for the rest, that human rights are equal to all people because of a shared humanity, and that these rights are endowed from birth. The Declaration has articles for the former kind of rights, relating to immediate, physical safety. It also has articles about the latter: the rights necessary for a fully-evolved, long-term, humanitarian civilization. Article 19 is of the second stripe; it recognizes the freedom to impart and obtain information as a necessary component of civilized life.

In his 2007 book “Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media,” media critical theorist Dr. Robert McChesney declared the world was entering a critical juncture, or “a period in which the old institutions and mores are collapsing,” a time in which the decisions we make “establish institutions and rules that likely put us on a course that will be difficult to change in any fundamental sense for decades or generations.”

This current communications revolution, brought about by a combination of technology that undermines existing systems, a crisis in journalism, economic upheaval and political strife, has tremendous stakes. “If fifteen or twenty years from now, the result of the communication revolution is merely technological wizardry or a testament to enhanced market opportunities for the world’s most privileged people, it will have been a failure,” McChesney wrote. “If in a generation social inequality has not begun to be dramatically reversed, democratic institutions are not considerably more vibrant, militarism and chauvinism have not been dealt a mighty blow, the environment has not been significantly repaired, then we will have had an unfulfilled communication revolution.”

Given that the right to communicate is inseparable from other human rights, and that the success of our critical moment hinges on the ability to communicate, a communication revolution requires a human rights revolution. That’s where CommunicationIsYourRight.org comes in.

CommunicationIsYourRight.org is a new initiative to call attention to Article 19, and educate the public about the importance of the right to communicate. It is an active, online petition to lobby the UN to bring the right to communicate to a debate. It is an initiative to pursue issues concerning the right to communicate, and to bring legislators, activists and citizens together to enact policies that strengthen the right to communicate. It also is a forum where people can exercise their right to communicate, by submitting all kinds of media, giving them an opportunity to express their perspective.

The freedom to communicate means the freedom to be part of a global conversation. It means giving the disenfranchised, the censored and the ignored equal footing in this ongoing communication revolution. It means giving all sides of an issue an even chance in the ecosystem of ideas. It means that even if all other human rights are stripped, the oppressed have the opportunity to declare “I am here, I am human.” Most importantly, it means giving people a role in the things that matter to them.

Media Roots - A Branch of the Indie Media Revolution

2010-05-22T11:46:00.001-05:00

Abby Martin is an artist, activist and citizen journalist based in Oakland, California, who recently launched a collaborative, online media project fueled by citizen journalism. In full disclosure, Martin, along with San Diego media reform advocate Mera Szendro Bok, and myself, are beginning a campaign that we hope will contribute to a national discussion about media reform. This campaign frames media reform as a human rights issue, an idea that is codified in international law, which will be the subject of further writing. But for now, I want to focus on Martin’s latest project and what she has to say about the growing independent media revolution that is making big changes in the information ecosystem.

MediaRoots.org launched recently on the principle that citizen journalism is necessary to provide the adequate information for a democracy. The name is a metaphor for how a tree sustains itself - with a network of roots below ground that are many times more extensive than the structure above. The idea is that in a democratic society, as it is in nature, there can be no progress without the “grassroots.”

“In order for people to build up their communities, they need to be well informed on the issues that impact their lives,” the about information on the site says. “Far-reaching grassroots networks of information and activism created by us must extend far beyond the institutional structures created for us.”

In a recent phone call with Abby Martin, the site’s creator, she discussed how Media Roots and other independent and citizen media sites are attempting to fill a void left by a retreating mainstream media. Out of this vacuum of comes a demand for information, which is causing resurgence in the citizen media movement.

“Worldwide, we see citizen journalism happening everywhere,” she said. “It’s a renaissance. I think that’s where media is headed, as far as real media.”

The latest reports show that independent and citizen journalism is growing in the United States and abroad. Spot.us, a San Francisco-based, crowd-funded community journalism site recently announced it will expand its investigative journalism network to cover Seattle. Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, hyperlocal community newsrooms are in bloom, with an investment firm there financing the expansion of café/cooperative newsroom hybrids.

Martin says Media Roots, beyond providing more content for the public, is also a pathway beyond the blocks that inhibit the free flow of content into mass media. Publication ownership, private interest advertising, source dependency, and flak machines are all blocks to the free flow of information, and form the basis for Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model."

“This is what you say, this is what you’re told,” Martin said. “People don’t understand that everything they see and hear is filtered.”

Fulfilling this purpose also means collecting information from other sources across the web and presenting them to visitors.

“It’s scary because the web has so much information, and it’s important to guide people to the most credible information,” she said.

To that end, Martin’s site currently features aggregated news content from mainstream and alternative news content. But she’s hoping to find citizen journalists to create original content that will dominate Media Roots. She’s already received word from several journalists who want to produce content for her site, including an Apache attack-helicopter pilot stationed in Germany who plans to file behind-the-scenes reports and perspectives.

While citizen journalism and the hyperlocal newsroom are gaining momentum, they are only plugging small streams coming from a massive communication dike. On a national scale, the media system still is collapsing. Ahead of a May 11 national summit in Washington, DC on the future of journalism, public media and open internet, Free Press released a paper that described the situation as “grim.”

“The implications for our communities are dire: Even after decades of newsroom layoffs and broad cost-cutting, traditional news outlets continue to produce the vast majority of original reporting,” Free Press wrote in the paper, “New Public Media: A Plan for Action. “Blogs and amateur reporting are not enough to fill the void. Professional reporters, fact checkers and editors are needed to keep a watchful eye on the powerful and to reliably examine the vital issues that most Americans don’t have time to follow closely.”

The media reform organization advocated new sources of funding for the country’s anemic public media budget, including reducing the commercial broadcast industry’s $10 Billion annual entitlement of public radio spectrum, to be placed in a trust fund for long-term viability. Martin doesn’t have a trust fund, but she has something else that the citizen journalism movement needs to survive.

“I don’t have 100 grand,” she said, “but I do have my spirit.”

The Fortune 500 Cover and Other Criticism the Media Can’t Stomach

2010-05-02T14:38:00.001-05:00

Chicago-based comic book artist Chris Ware has an impressive brag list. He’s won the Eisner award nine times, the Harvey award just as many times, a Guardian First Book award and was recognized by the National Cartoonists Society. He’s most widely known for a groundbreaking alternative comic series known as the Acme Novelty Library, noted for its poignant critique of consumerism and palpable sense of dehumanization and nihilism.

Ware’s artistic style and critical sensibilities were periodically commissioned by the The New Yorker magazine in the production of cover art. So it came as little surprise that other magazines would enlist Ware for a special cover design, including Fortune magazine, which was planning something special for their annual 500 list issue, due out in May 2010.

The artist unveiled his commission before the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, or C2E2, on April 23. Despite this being the inaugural year for the convention, about 28,000 flocked to the Lakeside Center at Chicago’s McCormick Place - which compared favorably with the 2006 launch of New York’s Comic-con, and secured C2E2 as the fourth-largest meeting of its type in the country, according to Publisher’s Weekly. The point being, it was a fairly important venue for Ware’s announcement.

Satire is the dominating characteristic of the magazine cover. At a C2E2 panel, he pointed out the details in his work, revealing the obsessive compulsiveness in which he included China dumping money into the ocean, homes being flooded or foreclosed, helicopters lifting money out of the U.S. Treasury and depositing the cash to the CEOs dancing happily above the Middle American wasteland.

A teapot in the shape of an elephant bellows steam as an army of protesters march in unison around it - an obvious reference to the Tea Party movement. People toil in an “Exploitation Factory” behind the southern, razor-wired border, of which only the products of the slave labor are permitted to cross. “Milton Friedman Paycheck Advance” conducts business in the shadow of Sears Tower, poking fun at the famous Chicago economist who advised Reagan on monetary policy and opposed Keynesian economics. Homes sit in disrepair in “Toxic Asset Acres,” while overturned cars pile up nearby. In the distance, Greece is pillaged.

Ware told his C2E2 audience that he accepted the job because it would be “like doing the 1929 issue of the magazine.” But, apparently Fortune didn’t share the same appreciation for Ware’s micro-vignettes and rejected the cover.

When reached for comment, Fortune told Gawker.com:

“As we often do, Fortune commissioned multiple artists to submit cover concepts for our iconic Fortune 500 issue. Being huge fans of Chris Ware’s work, we asked him to participate, but in the end we chose a design submitted illustrator Daniel Pelavin.”

Of course, Fortune makes no mention of any of these “multiple artists,” and this statement does nothing to clarify why Ware’s cover was rejected. It has not been independently verified whether the commission of multiple artists to submit cover concepts is standard operating procedure at Fortune. Even without this information, much can be inferred by looking at the bland, unimaginative cover that Fortune chose for the 500 issue:

This news slowly made its way through blogs, only recently coming to the attention of widely-read websites. Most of that attention has been concerned with the subversive, satirical nature of Ware’s creation, accompanied by a casual acceptance that Fortune never would have accepted such a cover in the first place. While both points are notable, they come short in explaining the full range of meaning in Ware’s actions, Fortune’s rebuff, and what that really says about the media system in the U.S.

There’s a layer of meaning behind satire that sometimes escapes consideration, especially in this episode. Satire, as conveyed through irony and sarcasm, is a critique. All satire must have reference, in Ware’s case, the behavior of the ruling class of the corporatocracy. Considering the root material, Ware’s cover shouldn’t be oversimplified as something patently subversive - it’s subversive because it is a critique, which apparently Fortune finds offensive.

A few did pick up on this meta-critique, including Columbia Journalism Review writer Ryan Chittum, who wrote of Fortune’s statement in The Audit blog:

“That’s a flacky way of saying that its presentation of American capitalism was beyond the pale of acceptable discourse so we’ll just draw some big numbers on the cover. Fortune had the chance to have one of the best magazine covers of the decade, and it killed it. It shows how limited the range of opinions are in the mainstream business press, which is to say the entire business press.”

The Audit is Chittum’s ongoing critique of the business press, where he frequently calls attention to gaps in media coverage, as well as corporate flack, propaganda and misinformation. He calls Fortune out for lionizing corporate America and skewing its coverage, making special note of the magazines amazingly uncritical, unimaginative cover stories at a time when the economy is crumbling. These stories include “The Toughest Car Company of Them All,” “Building Great Leaders,” and the near-offensive “CEO of the Decade.”

Chittum is one of many journalists who’ve taken the business press to task, ostensibly the segment of the mainstream media that should have been the first to blow the whistle on the financial malfeasance that decimated the American economy, which now is being investigated by the SEC and the U.S. Senate. This gap in analysis and coverage is something that’s realized and written about across the world.

The European Journalism center hosted a conference on this very subject in Brussels on November 9 and 10, 2009, and again this year, on March 15 and 16. One of the main topics: “Analysis of why mass media failed to report effectively on the Wall Street and City shenanigans that caused the crisis, and why the few specialist reporters who saw it coming failed to get their message across.”

This failure of the business press in light of the economic crisis closely mirrors another tragic failure among the mainstream media. It has an eerie resemblance to the kind of stenography and permissiveness among the media that allowed for such disasterous decisions as the Iraq war, something which Bill Moyers provided a thorough analysis of in “Buying the Iraq War.”

Returning to Ware’s submission, we can derive even further meaning from this instance of satire. In analyzing the Ware artwork as a critical statement, and placing it into context as the cover of a mainstream, if specialized, media product, we can view it as a critique of that media product. The illustration may not just be a statement about the ruling class, but also about the very magazine it graces. That kind of critique, too, is something Fortune finds offensive.

Herein lies the essential point: that more than a critique of corporate America, Fortune can’t even stand a critique of itself. But this inability to stomach criticism isn’t limited to Fortune magazine, or even business publishing. It’s something endemic to most of mainstream media, right down to the people who write the news.

Jeremy Scahill, the Polk and Izzy award-winning journalist recalled in a recent interview on Bob McChesney’s Media Matters show on the Urbana, Illinois NPR affiliate WILL, how little criticism mainstream reporters accept. Scahill spoke of an instance where, during a filming of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he challenged NBC’s political director, Chuck Todd, for his lack of critical questioning of the Bush administration.

This is how he described the conversation in the interview (emphasis mine):

“I was able to confront him about statements he made disparaging of those calling for accountability for torture under the Bush administration… I got so much feedback from that moment of confronting a corporate celebrity journalist on something that he had said that was outrageous that showed the people of this country are starving for independent media that can be broadcast to a much wider audience.

The basic point was, all I did was say, ‘Why don’t you people that have access to the powerful ever ask them a relevant question? Why don’t you ask him about the war? Why don’t you ask him about this?

And I confronted Chuck Todd about something specific he said, and I didn’t do it in a hostile way, I just brought it up with him, and he went bananas about it, because these guys are not used to having to endure any criticism of their work.

They are the ones that are conveying to the American people the information they need to know. So when somebody they’ve never heard of, like myself, has the audacity to question the veracity of what they’re doing as quote-unquote journalists, they have such thin skin about it.

So that was incredible, you know, thing to be a part of, because after the show Chuck Todd accused me of sullying his reputation on TV. He literally said “you sullied my reputation on TV.” No, Chuck, you sullied your own reptation by acting like a stenographer every day for the powerful.”

Huffington post made note of this event, as did Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who relayed an email sent by Scahill which describes the confrontation after the cameras went off (emphasis also mine):

“Right as we walked off stage, he said to me “that was a cheap shot.” I said “what are you talking about?” and he said “you know it.” I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: “that’s not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV.”

In considering this specific spat, it’s important to realize the difference between personal egos being obstinate, and private media being obstinate. The former is fairly trivial in the big scheme of things, and has been a part of human interaction since the dawn of mankind. The latter takes on a much wider importance, as the media plays a crucial role in our information-gathering, the formation of a worldview, and the ability to make important decisions in our lives.

That kind of obstinance, too, has been around for some time and was noted by Upton Sinclair, the prolific journalist who essentially founded modern media criticism with his book “The Brass Check.” In this work, he gives an anecdote which is perhaps the best illumination the problem of criticizing media that has been written.

When legendary muckraker Lincoln Steffens began writing exposes of political corruption, especially in the state of Rhode Island, where public officials accepted bribes from businessmen who stood to gain enormous profits. Sinclair took great interest in these writings, but was frustrated by Steffens’ inability to answer how to end the corruption. With that question in mind, Sinclair drafted a letter:

“Mr. Steffens, you go from city to city and from state to state, and you show us these great corporations buying public privileges and capitalizing them for tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, and unloading the securities upon the general investing public. You show this enormous mass of capital piling up, increasing at compound interest, demanding its toll of dividends, which we, the people who do the hard work of the world, who produce the real wealth of the world, must continue forever to pay. I ask you to tell us, what are we to do about this? Shall we go on forever paying tribute upon this mass of bribery and fraud? Can we go on paying it forever, even if we want to? And if not, what then? What will happen when we refuse to pay?”

Steffens replied that this was a fantastic critique of his work and lobbied to have it printed in McClure’s, but that idea was rejected by the publisher. Sinclair was determined to have his criticism heard, so he sent the letter to many other publications, including Collier’s Weekly, where the publisher Robert J. Collier wrote and asked Sinclair to come for a meeting.

At the time, Sinclair was 25, and a husband and father of one baby, struggling to keep the family alive on a paltry $30 a month. He was extremely nervous about the meeting after being told by a friend that Collier's was run on a “personal basis,” and if Robbie took to Sinclair, then the young writer’s “fortune is made.”

Robbie did take to Sinclair, saying he admired the article and thought it one of the “most illuminating discussion of present-day problems that he has ever read,” and invited him to dinner with friends and editorial staff. “He and his friends don’t meet many Socialists, naturally, so I am to tell them about Socialism,” Sinclair wrote. “I am to tell them everything, and needn't be afraid. I answer, quite simply, that I shall not be in the least afraid.”

Peter Collier, Robbie’s father, also attended the dinner. He spoiled the evening, Sinclair remembers:

“And here he had come in to dinner with his son and found his son entertaining a Socialist. “What? What’s this?” he cried. It was like a scene in a comedy. He would hear one sentence of what I had to say, and then he would go up in the air. “Why-why-that’s perfectly outrageous! Who ever heard of such a thing?” He would sputter for five or ten minutes, to the vast amusement of the rest of the guests.

Presently he heard about the “Open Letter to Lincoln Steffens.” “What’s this? You are going to publish an article like that in my magazine? No, sir! I won’t have it! It’s preposterous!” And there sat Robbie, who was supposed to be the publisher; there sat Norman Hapgood, who was supposed to be the editor - and listened to Old Peter lay down the law. Norman Hapgood has since stated that he does not remember this episode, that he never knew Peter Collier to interfere with the policy of the magazine. Well, the reader may believe that the incident was not one that I would forget in a hurry. Not if I should live to be as old as Methuselah will I forget my emotions, when, after the dinner, the old gentleman got me off in a corner and put his arm around my shoulders. “You are a nice boy, and I can see that you’ve got brains, you know what you’re talking about. But what you ought to do is to put these ideas of yours into a book. Why do you try to get them in my magazine, and scare away my half million subscribers?”

Sinclair's critique never was printed in Collier's, and he was embittered by the ordeal.

“Such is the picture of a magazine “run on a personal basis.” And see what it means to you, the reader, who depend upon such a magazine for the thoughts you think. Here is Lincoln Steffens, taking his place as America’s leading authority on the subject of political graft; and here am I, making what Steffens declares is the best criticism of his work. It is accepted and paid for, and a date is set to give it to you, the reader; but an ignorant and childish old pack-peddler steps in, and with one wave of his hand sweeps it out of your sight. Sixteen years have passed, and only now you hear about it - and most of you don’t hear about it even now!”

Fortune magazine is not a private business. It is published by Time Inc., a subsidiary of the publicly-traded, transnational media conglomerate Time Warner, which is the world’s second largest media corporation behind Vivendi, but ahead of News Corporation and Disney. But it’s not hard to imagine Ware’s situation as a metaphor, with Time Inc.’s Editor in Chief John Huey playing the role of Old Man Collier, slinging an arm around Ware and exclaiming “Why do you try to get your drawings in my magazine and scare away my 850,000 subscribers?”

Sinclair had a solution to this lack of consideration to criticism, namely the establishment of a strictly nonpartisan, weekly publication which accepts no advertisements or editorials, and whose diverse board of directors serve an essential role to criticize their own publication:

“These various groups should have a voice on the board, for the purpose of criticizing the publication and holding it rigidly to its declared policy, ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ It should be provided that each director has the right to a column twice a year in the publication, in which to state any criticism of its policy which he may have; also that any five directors have the right once a month to insert a column pointing out what they consider failure of the paper to live up to its professed standards.”

Sinclair advocated media criticism because he realized the crucial role it played in the media ecosystem. Criticism allows failures to be pointed out and corrected. Criticism is an essential component in perfecting the practices of any organization; without it, there is no imperative or direction to improve.

A media system dominated by private interests who cannot so much as consider criticism is a sign that those private interests don’t particularly care about public interest. It also signals an inability to change. Mass media conglomerates are disinterested in change because they don’t serve the interests of the people who are criticizing them.

A media system catering to private interests is not going to accept the criticism of the public. A system with more public input, a system that’s more accountable to the public interest, has much better odds of fulfilling the information needs of a democratic society.