…most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candies for the mind.

Fighting off the urge to rant and rave yet again about the breadth of Wisconsin corporate/Republican idiocy, I’m declaring a truce to get the tape off the walls and air out the stench left by Scott Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers. Yes, I know that Scotty Walker and the Fitzgerald Brothers sounds like the name of some wannabe motown white-boys seventies garage band from Mequon, and–in fact–it is. But that’s not what I’m on about here this morning.

This morning I’ll skip all that about teacher lay-offs, and school budgets capped by property tax limits, and why it’s good for corporations to turn the US into a third world economy; and, rather, I’ll simply share this information. I’ve lifted it from Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed. Paul abstracted the list from a great paper titled Avoid News, Towards a Healthy News Diet by Rolf Dobelli:

Fifteen reasons why news is bad for you:

1. News misleads systematically
2. News is irrelevant
3. News limits understanding
4. News is toxic to your body
5. News massively increases cognitive errors
6. News inhibits thinking
7. News changes the structure of your brain
8. News is costly
9. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
10. News is produced by journalists
11. Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always
12. News is manipulative
13. News makes us passive
14. News gives us the illusion of caring
15. News kills creativity

The men and the women of the Madison Police Department train for crowd situations where an agitator or provocateur may try to create safety risks for citizens and officers. During recent demonstrations around the Capitol Square no such situation has arisen. Crowd behavior has been exemplary, and thousands of Wisconsin citizens are to be commended for the peaceful ways in which they have expressed First Amendment rights. — Madison Police Chief Noble Wray

I just watched Meet the Press for the first time since maybe 1961 when I was home alone with the flu with a limited number of Sunday morning broadcast channels available. I haven’t missed it. Today Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi, a Southern Democrat who will announce for the Presidency as a Republican on or about April Fools Day, evoked Sarah Palin and claimed that the workers of Wisconsin have circulated posters of Walker with cross hairs over his face.

And the lie went unchallenged while an evil meme was allowed to be sown.

The host, forgettable except for his clonal resemblance to Anderson Cooper (also forgettable, though perhaps a little less so), showed a clip of a demonstrator with a sign comparing Wisconsin Governor Walker to Egyptian dictator Mubarak and explicitly claimed that this was a dominant theme in the two weeks of rallies, protests and marches.

And the lie went unchallenged and another evil meme was reinforced.

People allow their opinions to be shaped by mainstream shows like Meet the Press (sponsored by Bank of America), but today’s coverage of collective bargaining and Wisconsin politics lacked objectivity–that’s as kind as I can be. As the story continues to unfold in Madison with possible lay-offs, strikes, and budgetary gridlock, it seems unlikely that anyone on the national news scene will get it right.

This afternoon at 4pm, the Capitol will be closed and protesters will be evicted. The decision comes down from the Governor through his Dept. of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch to the Chief of the Capitol Police, Charles Tubbs. Chief Tubbs is a long time state employee, appointed to his position by a Democratic governor, and he must be feeling a little conflicted today. The police unions oppose his boss’s anti-union stance and his fifty employees are union members.

On March 1st, the Governor faces the third deadline for his budget address. The address is required by law to be delivered in January. The governor got an extension to February 23rd. When that day approached and his non-negotiable demands faced strong opposition, he was forced to ask the Republicans of the State Senate for another extension. He now intends to deliver his speech on March 1st in the Capitol, so it’s important to him that he clears the building well before then. He doesn’t want to hear any opposition.

The Governor’s one-way, non-negotiable intentions have forced local government across the state to address collective bargaining before the governor himself spoils the relationships between towns and their employees. So, in La Crosse County, Janesville, Racine, Sheboygan, Madison, and at the Milwaukee Area Technical College, new contracts have been made that include pay raises, pension contributions and health benefits for nurses, teachers and other public workers, benefits that the governor had planned to eliminate.

And the governor is a whiner. The unions told him they’d be willing to pay more for health and pensions and give up raises, but they needed him to agree that he wouldn’t eliminate public worker collective bargaining rights. He said, “No way, my way or the highway, I will not give an inch.” A week or so later he was moved to issue a whiny press release claiming “Union Bosses Say One Thing, Do Another.”

Well, duh-uh.

The month of March will be crucial. The Governor’s speech on March first will give him a chance to come to the table or end his political career. The absent 14 democratic Senators may get a chance to come home and help save $169 million of our money by re-financing existing bonds. The deadline for the re-fi is March 15th, so the absent 14 may have a few more weeks of pizza and motel cable-vision if the governor can’t learn to compromise. But meanwhile we’ll be organizing the recall elections for the governor’s Republican supporters in the Senate, canvassing for Kloppenburg in an effort to restore balance to the Supreme Court, and basically laughing at the noobie governor that Haley Barbour put in the cross hairs this morning on Meet the Press.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.
Hunter S. Thompson

The Columbia Journalism Review has cranked up The News Frontier Database, “…a searchable, living, and ongoing documentation of digital news outlets across the country.” They launched with a list of about fifty digital news sites, the beginning of an ambitious effort to catalog sites that meet the following criteria:

1. Digital news sites included in the NFDB should be primarily devoted to original reporting and content production.
2. With rare exceptions, the outlet should have at least one full-time employee.
3. The digital news site should be something other than the web arm of a legacy media entity. (There’s no doubt that some of the most important online journalism is being produced by the websites of newspapers and other legacy media, but this database is devoted to a new kind of publication.)
4. The digital news site should be making a serious effort to sustain its work financially, whether that be through advertising, grants, or other revenue sources.

That third criterion helps the database administrators focus, but it does little to advance the cause of gathering information about online news. Surely “legacy” online publishers that shift from print to pixels deserve recognition. And those who augment their dead tree efforts with electronic publications are among the most informative, best positioned news outlets online. (Click here for the list of outlets in the CJR database.)

Five years ago “The Media Consortium” was organized. Participants in the consortium must have

• A journalism-driven mission
• Staff and organizational capacity to participate in projects that benefit the organization and the Consortium
• The commitment of senior leadership to personally participate in Media Consortium activities, projects, and meetings
• A mission that promotes progressive ideals

When I heard about the CJR database, I thought it would be interesting to see how many of the Media Consortium members were listed. The CJR list includes a lot of familiar sites, some of them liberal. For example CJR lists Slate, Salon, The Huffington Post, TPM, and Politico. But the only Media Consortium member they list is Grist. Several of the consortium members are disqualified by the CJR criterion number 3 (“…something other than the web arm of a legacy media entity”). Among these, I suppose, would be The American Prospect, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Progressive. But, while the CJR database is in its early days exclusion of the entire consortium membership except for Grist betrays a blind spot when it comes to progressive media. There are dozens of high-profile local, regional, and global news sites that meet the CJR criteria that aren’t listed yet. Among the Media Consortium sites that could qualify as web journalism pioneers and important to include in any catalog “new media,” or digital journalism efforts are: Afro-Netizen, Alternet, Campus Progress, Chelsea Green, Democracy Now, Feministing, Reproductive Health Reality Check, Truthout, and Workers Independent News.

These two sources, Columbia Journalism’s News Frontier Database and the Media Consortium, have each listed 50 emerging media news sources. It’s amazing that the only site they have in common is Grist.

We don’t need you to hold a rally to restore America’s sanity. We go to that rally every Monday through Thursday night, when we tune in to your show. We keep watching because you call out the enduring ridiculousness of politics and, for a half hour, you make us laugh about it rather than despair over it. We don’t expect you to end it or fix it; no one can, and your naming it is enough. As you told the “Crossfire” guys, you thrive on the theater of politics: “The absurdity of the system provides us the most material.”

We already have a formerly hilarious satirist turned sober politician. America doesn’t need another Al Franken. We need Jon Stewart.

We don’t expect you to end it or fix it; no one can… I can’t believe Carlos commited that to pixels! It’s that kind of negativity that we must drive out. Can we overcome that kind of pessimistic world view? Why, YES WE CAN! The upbeat, uplifting quality of absurd theater like the Rally to Restore Sanity is a good place to start. I understand the WaPo’s vested interest in dissension and conflict, in keeping the Gordian knot of American politics wound tight enough to sell advertising while maintaining the appearance of impartiality. Fortunately, there are millions of us with clear eyes and these little first amendment machines that moot the nonsensical noise emanating from Carlos and his ilk, representatives of our modern mortgaged press. Carlos had opined that we don’t need another Al Franken. Well, I opined right back at him:

Dear Editor:
I just finished your embarrassingly out of touch screed regarding Jon Stewart and the Rally to Restore Sanity, and I scarcely know where to begin my critique. Let me simply say that I disagree with much of what you wrote. Diving into the middle of things, your assertion that we don’t need another Al Franken is unconvincing at best. Of course we need more people in government of Franken’s caliber, and I daresay fewer Chuck Grassleys and Jim Demints. So if we were to lose another principled comic genius to the public stage, the country would be better off and the quality of our leadership and our governance would be improved. I could go on, but unlike you I’m not being paid for my opinion so let me be brief instead. Jon Stewart recently had Condi Rice on his show flogging her autobiographical children’s book, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family.”

Dr. Rice was, as usual, boring and out of touch, making virtues of pugnacity and prevarication, revealing something about the foundations of the character defects that informed her leadership style. Adding insult to audience injury, someone decided to re-run that show this week.

Jon Stewart owes the country a whale of a show on October 30th, if only to make up for the tedium he visited upon us the last week or two with the Condoleezza Rice appearances.

Frank Paynter

The activists organized anti-war rallies. The rallies were choreographed to meet production schedules for the nightly television news. The cameras and reporters appeared right on time. They shot enough video and recorded enough voice over to prepare a thirty second spot and then the news producer presented that brief piece between the latest criminal mayhem and whatever legislative scandal had appeared. Cut to commercial and on to the weather and sports.

Meaningful engagement on the part of the activists was limited by their desire to finesse the news cycle, and the meaning of that engagement as reported was narrowed, any detail sacrificed to editorial guidelines and production constraints. And so with clockwork regularity another evening news cycle would contain another march for world peace, a fireman rescuing a cat from a tree, cut to commercial and on to weather and sports. If the peace activists sought to inform people, to rally them to oppose war, and to capture political influence, they failed. Part of their failure can be blamed on the Procrustean nature of the news cycle and their inability to break out of that mold.

The activists failed and so did the journalists. Their inability to break out of the editorial control of businesses with vested interests in the success of what we now can see as failed foreign and economic policies wreaked havoc on our culture, twisted the values of many to align with the values espoused by mad men and narcissists, destroyed the faith in our democracy of many more, and prised professional broadcast journalists from their chairs to be replaced by rank propagandists.

All of this is obvious, redundant at best. I share it here as a prologue, an introduction to a couple of posts I’m writing. Last week in Orlando, I had the great good fortune to use press credentials to get close to a couple of people who have important roles in the continuously unfolding drama of American politics: Newt Gingrich, James Carville, and Rob Reiner among others. Sharing the messages they presented at the AARP convention without background and without a lens that focuses on their interests would be to do them a disservice. So rather than hack together some posts that parroted their words from the stage, I decided to take some time and add a little background, to break out of the Procrustean news cycles and hopefully to underscore the meaning behind their appearances in Orlando.

To assure complete coverage, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff tweeted the event. twitter: complete coverage of the World Cup, the Lakers, and deaths by firing squad. All the fits that’s news…

and a one

and a two

and a three

tasteful to a fault.

A freelance writer, Cathy also blogs at the Huffington Post which this week is promoting “a week of eating in.” I met her this afternoon at a book signing at Rainbow Bookstore. Confession: in addition to buying an autographed copy of Cathy’s book, I also picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, An Eater’s Manifesto and Who Rules America, Power Politics and Social Change by G. William Domhoff. The latter will of course provide food for thought.

Owen Slot, the Times head sports reporter, had this to say about Shaun White:

“…neither fear nor physical frailty, nor indeed self-awareness nor the remotest glimmer of self-deprecation seem to interrupt the rise of his fame or the expansion of his personal empire.

The Double McRecovery [Mr. Slot’s obscure name for White’s amazing “Double McTwist 1260″] served only to crank up his rise to the top of the chat-show establishment.”

Dry humour.

The London Times called the bobsled run “the death track,” and styled Vancouver 2024 as “the calamity games.” To underscore the nature of the calamity, Slot cites the case of the Zamboni breakdown. It seems that the ice surfacing machine had some mechanical difficulties, since repaired. It’s ironic that London, perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in the English speaking world, is served by ill-informed and provincial sports hacks such as Slot. Planning and presenting a gathering as complex as the Olympics is a huge challenge. The Brits, more familiar with Goldie Lookin Chain than with Gold Medals, will have their challenge in 2024. One can only hope that the world’s press treats London 2024 better than the London Times has treated Vancouver 2024.