Bloggers, Corporations, and Plausible Deniability in the Age of Google

This has been on my mind for quite some time, ever since I wrote that I was a “Free Range Mama.” It’s only weighed more on me since adding a Blog With Integrity button to my sidebar, which is a reaction many of us had to the controversy over the heightened presence of sponsorships/commercial interests competing for the attention of bloggers at Blogher ’09. There, the murky and emergent ethics of blogging for pay or in exchange for “gifts”, along with anxiety over a pecking order of blogger desirability, found expression in heated discussions of swag.

In my “Free Range Mama” post I said I’d made peace with not ever being a “WalMart Mom” or having certain corporate advertising, sponsorship or other commercial interests affiliated with my blog. But even after crossing off several companies that to my eyes have sketchy ethical practices or support political organizations I don’t agree with, there’s still a large gray zone that’s left. I mentioned that I patronize JC Penney stores, until recently I shopped (stopping when its CEO made stupid remarks about health insurance reform) at Whole Foods, and I like Target a bit too much relative to some probable unsavory labor practices that I haven’t Googled yet. And what’s complicating is that the grey zone quickly gets subjective.

Brandwashing Right Wing Memes Through Hyperlocal News: The New Fox News of the Blogosphere?

Hyperlocal news blogging as the new sexy source of revenue has gotten some press lately. NBC/Outside.in has launched a hybrid Twitter/Yelp/Blogs/Flickr feed site as part of its NYC portal. The hyperlocal Blog Network Association seeks to fill a gap left by the demise of daily print reporting and that wasn’t ever truly adequately covered by local tv news. AOL bought Patch.com, which started with what sounds like Gov2.0/Journ2.0 leanings as voiced by its Google-employed founder; it’s unclear whether this orientation survived the corporate acquisition.

Apparently, if national ad buys are shrinking for old media and national ad buys on portals/heavily trafficked sites are only slowly gaining ground, the local ad market looks lucrative ($32bn as estimated by KelseyGroup, a new media industry analysis group). Or at least that’s the pitch.

The Washington Post looks at a case study of what happened to their affiliated hyperlocal blog in Loudoun County. Local ad sales weren’t enough to sustain the WaPo’s efforts. Paradoxically, population growth was not paralleled by an increase in media sources for information, but resulted in its opposite–a reduction in news outlets:

Robert DuPree, the School Board chairman who moved to Loudoun more than 25 years ago, said the media’s problems were, for better or worse, a reflection of the county’s growth. “We were at 65,000 residents then, and now we’re at 280,000,” he said. “We lost a radio station, and we lost one of our papers. We used to have a local cable news show. In some respects, we’ve gone backwards.”

The WaPo article includes two very interesting facts that I think are worth contemplating if we’re to understand hyperlocal news blogging as a potentially important extension of the Fourth Estate.

1. (private) homeowner’s associations have highly-trafficked blogs for residents that make public information of concern to the people who belong to that gated community/private neighborhood.
2. From the article: “Amy Burns, 40, publisher of the Loudoun Independent, newly purchased by technology magnate and Republican fundraiser Bill Dean, is fighting to get her weekly out of bankruptcy.” [emphasis mine]

So on the one hand we have little quasi-towns in the form of homeowner’s associations who publish their own news. On the other hand, we have various corporations buying into this space, and in fact many of the new media owners are not Fortune 500 moguls but affluent Republican/conservative businesspeople who have some sort of geographic tie to the media they own. Much like Bill Dean, who lives in DC and invests in the Virginia exurban paper mentioned above in Loudoun County, where his company MC Dean is headquartered and many employees live and work. More about Dean and his company here, here (pdf), and here.

This is a big concern to me. Conservatives have been very active in mobilizing on the local level–school boards, city councils, secretary of state seats, elected offices of sheriffs/judges/city attorneys general–the list goes on. I’m convinced that the bi-level schizophrenia that California experiences (Blue in national elections, Red very often in gerrymandered local/state elections and referenda) is often affected by a distinct lack of Democratic Party candidates in those same races. Also lacking, perhaps, is the organizational muscle to sustain these campaigns. (If this is true, shame on us.)

Fox News satisfies all the right-wing’s propaganda needs at the national and international level. But the same can’t be said for the blogosphere. Oh sure, there’s RedState and Drudge Report and FreeRepublic and others. But here’s my thought: clearly the right won’t be happy til they infiltrate all news-oriented hyperlocal blogging everywhere, masking conservative opinions and framing conservative views as “truth” and “reporting” under the guise of “news and information.”

Take, for example, a look at Philip Anschutz‘s purchase of Examiner.com (which absorbed NowPublic.com), a hyperlocal national blogging site. It pays citizen journalist contributors to blog in a variety of fields. It touts access to traditional media sources as a way for bloggers to make a reputation as citizen journalists, offering credibility and/or a media clip for one’s reel, should one have ambitions to tv punditry. In turn, Examiner.com gets user-generated content, traffic, and a sort of “citizen journalism” grassrootsy credibility. For the more partisan practitioners who are “examiners,” they get a bully pulpit with which to blast stories using conservative sources, subject matter, or framing offered in a seemingly non-partisan environment. Many conservative bloggers are labeled exactly that. But many others don’t label themselves, or in self-identifying, they choose “libertarian,” “independent,” or even “non-partisan” (which can still be partisan). Other labels, such as “So-and-so Gun Rights Examiner” belie a certain perspective even though conventional left-right labeling isn’t in the picture.

It’s instructive to look at the tiny link to “The Foundation for a Better Life” at the bottom right corner of the Examiner.com web page. When you click, you’re brought to Values.com, which is an airbrushed, sepia-toned, less abrasive, less hard-edged version of many of the ideas to be found at the Values Voters Summit.

When you’re on FreeRepublic, you know it. The air seethes with partisanship. I appreciate the transparency.

But I don’t appreciate stories about the recent spate of “undercover sting” operations conducted on ACORN by conservative activists armed with video cameras which are then repackaged wholesale and offered as “citizen journalism.” One example may not make a trend, but I wonder if what’s happening here is a sort of ‘brandwashing’: if you Google ‘Acorn’ and ‘Examiner’, you can see the extent to which the story was a mainstay for many individual Examiner.com bloggers (approximately 210,000 pages of results), and how the ‘Examiner’ brand seems to have laundered some of the taint off what would otherwise be a story more naturally suited to extremist fringe sites like WorldNetDaily (approximately 884,000 pages of results when ‘WorldNetDaily’ and ‘Acorn’ are googled).

I lack the quantitative skills to really piece together data on this, but it may be worth both 1) tracking overtly conservative ownership of hyperlocal sites and 2) figuring out how to measure adoption statistics in mainstream media of hard-right stories pushed using seemingly “nonpartisan” means like Examiner.com.

I speculate that moves to domesticate, buff, and otherwise soften extremist hard-right memes will be taking place in earnest over the course of the next 18 months. Maybe Examiner.com plays a role in that civilizing veneer. Some Rovean operative somewhere may be planning out the calendar now: Perhaps after “softening the beach” with a pounding from shrill advance troops, we’ll have a kinder, gentler Tea Party right about February in time for 2010 Congressional races to heat up. But by then we’ll all be so relieved we no longer have the strident political discourse of the fall of 2009 we won’t notice we’ll have been moved, however imperceptibly, by the shocking/upsetting Overton windows of the fall– we’ll be grateful for the relative sanity of spring 2010.

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Updated to add: I think hyperlocal beat reporting is useful and genuinely grassroots. I simply think that partisan bias should be identified up front. I also think it might be worthwhile to cultivate a place for hyperlocal blogging to live so that it becomes part of our information infrastructure.

I think NPR and PBS already cover some of this ground, although not with the kind of on-the-ground detail several dedicated vbloggers/bloggers could. Ideally, funding more of NPR/CPB/PBS to cover the salaries of hyperlocal beat reporters would be a welcome addition to the local, state, and national news we already get from these sources or from corporate media.

Why CPB/NPR/PBS? Because they have an explicit public affairs mission that they pretty much carry out. (I appreciate my local NPR station and at the same I don’t think they’re the end-all, be-all news source.)

They have an infrastructure–from funding to administration to hiring–that already exists. Very often they partner with community colleges, colleges, or universities for facilities. Podcasts, tweets, vlogging, hyperlocal blogging are all areas they could easily move into in partnership with existing political bloggers. Why not scale up the audience by scaling down the tools of production to near-free blogging and other necessary equipment?

Most importantly, why leave hyperlocal blogging to the free market to fulfill? I’ve already indicated that maybe more than a few conservatives are eager to jump into the space to extend the reach of their partisan frames.

Think of the function NPR/PBS/CPB fills as analogous to health insurance reform–it’s the public option that keeps corporate media honest in a bottom-line environment when it makes not-so-good-for you, ratings-driven product.

UPDATED on 10/2/09 to add: It looks like NPR is doing exactly this–hiring local bloggers and citizen journalists in several pilot programs at about a dozen stations around the country. This is exciting–but I don’t think $3m is nearly enough.

The American University Center for Social Media has more on collaborative public media, with reports on a few specific initiatives that have already launched. They also have an excellent white paper, “Public Media 2.0, Dynamic, Engaged Publics” that thoroughly examines the subject and introduces innovative paradigms for understanding the new information economy. See also the Knight Foundation report, “Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.”

I’m hopeful that hyperlocal news gathering can galvanize citizens. Preliminary information seems to indicate that locally well-informed people are also more politically engaged at that level. Take a look at data from Seattle, which shows a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown of hyperlocal news blogs that served each neighborhood and corresponding high participation in local government projects.

Class

A cluster of musings around the word ‘class.’

Got into a discussion with a conservative person on Twitter regarding that person’s perception of “Marxist” tendencies in Van Jones (who became political collateral damage when Glenn Beck targeted him as such, and the Obama administration cut him loose from his Green Jobs Czar position). People have a really poor misunderstanding of what Marxism is, versus socialism, versus communism. When I questioned this conservative twitterer more closely, his three examples of socialist countries were China, North Korea, and Cuba.

Frustrated, I tweeted: People seem to think that socialism is any group of people who band together their resources for a united goal. No. This is Costco.

Hmmm, China’s stock exchange is red-hot profitable and the condo my parents bought in Shanghai has appreciated 400%, I told him.

As for North Korea and Cuba? Are we afraid of them? One ruled by a nutjob dictator who starves his own people and the other ruled by an anti-democratic political dynasty presiding over a tiny island nation that’s too small and too poor to really harm us?

He claimed socialism endangered democracy. I said, Look at Iran and their adulterated elections. It wasn’t socialism that endangered that election, it was theocracy and corruption. Just like theocracy and corruption endanger democracy in our country too.

How irrational, eh? Socialism/Marxism/communism is so scary it can be found in really only two examples out of all the countries on the planet, and yet it could take over our own.

Of course, it isn’t really about Marxism, is it? Because while Van Jones may no longer be a Marxist and instead is an eco-capitalist, he’s certainly still black. And that seems to be the problem for a lot of people.

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After being indirectly accused of being a Marxist myself by this twitterer (because I defended Jones and you know how guilt by association works…), I thought it was ironic that in daily life my son is hugely enamored with that uber-capitalist game, Monopoly. We’ve played Deep Sea Creature Monopoly and Pokemon Monopoly for hours at a stretch, with some games lasting for days. It’s gotten to the point where I should’ve been bankrupt several times in many games thereby ending them, but my son the moneybags spots me a hundred or tells me I don’t have to pay him rent when I land on his properties.

Early on in this kick, Hiro Protagonist lost a few rounds and I could see his eyes well up and his lower lip tremble. It hurts to lose. I told him, “Monopoly’s a game of chance, not skill. See how we roll the dice? Everything depends on your luck. Sometimes it’s with you, other times against you.”

Now he’s a total board game pro. He shrugs off loss. When winning, he likes to flaunt his spoils. I have pointed out to him that in one respect, Monopoly’s a lot like life: if you get some good breaks and own expensive real estate, chances are you’ll build on that fortune. I.e., it’s good to be a landlord. W00t for passive income!

I do have to say, that child has incredible luck. I’ve watched him clean up the “lunch” money pot (you pay a small amount then go “have lunch” instead of going to jail in the younger kids’ version) with lucky rolls of the die time and time again. If I weren’t watching carefully I’d say he was cheating–but no, it’s true luck. In keeping with his Ladies Love Little Guy persona, Lady Luck also loves him. I think our plan to have him skip college and become a pro poker player might just work.

Also, his counting, adding, and subtracting skills have really improved; he can add 3 +5 or 6+ 4 in his head and move the appropriate number of spaces on the game board. He loves adding up his money.

In short, this pseudo-Marxist parent has a way capitalist son. I don’t think the twitterer trying to red-bait me would’ve seen the humor or the contradiction.

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Recently some friends of our from Hiro’s old school had a terrible thing happen to them: they were out of town and some people broke into their house, had a party, and ended up burning down the living quarters of their beautiful old Spanish-style house. (I say house, but it was really a compound with a separate pool house. You get the drift.)

Their son and ours got to best buddies. We had playdates with them, we attended each others’ kid’s birthday parties. They’re very nice people and wear their good fortune lightly though it’s undeniable that they and we live in totally different social-economic strata. It’s not something they lord over people, nor is it something we try to dwell on either. It just is.

Mutual friends of ours immediately got together toys, clothes, and other donations. The family literally had nothing with them except what they’d brought on vacation. I thought long and hard about what to donate. Finally, it occurred to me that I could give them something they’d lost and that only I could give: pictures of their child with mine. Because if substantial parts of their house burned down while they were away, chances are all the mementos of their three kids were lost too.

I heard from the mom. Indeed all of their baby pictures were consumed in the fire. She wept when she found out what we had for them.

Spiral Tendrils on the Vine, Luscious Fruit So Divine

Excuse the iPhone autofill typos

Hello, Blog, I Really Have Missed You, Really

I know it didn’t sound like it the other day. That day I could barely be civil. I talked in grunts. Details squeezed out like tough little tantrum-y tears, in between growls and barks.

Perhaps the bad mood is related to the following:

I’ve been tweeting the stuffing out of the #Iranelection story. Just a little over two weeks ago, I happened to be hanging out on a Friday night at the local watering-hole-for-dull-married-with-kids people called Twitter. Vote counts from Iran’s greatly anticipated elections were coming in, and Mousavi supporters were hopeful even as strange results made them puzzled and then upset. Tweets started flying back and forth (pdf), like “Ten million votes counted only two hours after the close of polls? WTF [or its equivalent, in Farsi]??? IT CAN’T BE AHMADINEJAD!!!”

I quickly found a group of Iranians who were tweeting in Farsi and English, and followed. In Iran, the discontent hardened into firm conviction among many that the election was rigged. Events began to gather speed even at Twitter’s already hummingbird-fast metabolism. I went to bed as something unknowable was forming, the angry mutters and background-wallah (noise cooked especially for the ambient sound particular to a location in a film) growing in volume.

The next morning I woke up and it was well into the evening of the next day in Iran. Crowds were gathering in the street. They got bigger. Louder. More insistent.

I tweeted like a crazy woman. I retweeted all the Persians I’d followed and then some. I did the equivalent (on Twitter) of grabbing people by the collar and demanding that they follow and retweet the people I was following and retweeting. The most astonishing reports were flying through the air: protesters were now yelling, hurling rocks at the government henchmen sent to shut them down.

Taking over streets with marches 5 miles long and 500,000 people strong. I tried to tweet as much as I could and still be a decent human being and parent to my child. Weirdly, I felt responsible to these people who I’d casually began following expecting a much less bloody and distressing response to their election results.

People yelling turned to people being hit, cut, beaten with clubs, hauled away, or their computers or other equipment trashed into disuse. Bloody, then outright gruesome still photos and videos began leaking out of Iran. I retweeted it as fast as I could. Often I’d pass on Farsi tweets, hoping that it wasn’t a grocery list being urgently circulated. Trusting that the urgency of the moment meant that it wasn’t.

Here’s one mournful video I’ll always remember:

Both protests and Twitter, the means of “publishing” that dissent, became big stories.

Soon the paranoia and government disinformation campaigns set in. Non-Iranians trying to help get out word of how basijis (paramilitary thugs) were shooting, beating, “disappearing,” and otherwise terrorizing civilians suddenly realized that the porosity of Twitter was precisely what allowed the Iranian government to use its sophisticated monitoring technology to track ISP sources of uploads of provocative pictures and videos documenting the violence. Persian usernames became scarce and ubiquitous; scarce because now we were retweeting them blind, ubiquitous because what’s ever really hidden on the web? Ubiquitous because someone decided that we’d ALL adopt Tehran as our cities of origin and local time as our own.

Also almost immediately, of course, an important mullah made a speech promising a partial recount and otherwise chastising the protesters the government cracked down upon, saying that they’d brought violence upon themselves.

For people who hadn’t been paying attention prior to that first key weekend, the paranoia was greater. I still remembered who was really from Tehran, who was a diasporic Iranian, who was a non-Iranian helpfully masquerading as an Iranian but really from the west. Rumors flew that such-an-such username was really an alias used by the Iranian government as part of a counter-intelligence spying/disinformation campaign.

My memory of who was who was all I had to offer by way of credibility as someone who passed along nearly everything I could get my hands on that originated from my Iranian twitterers. Was that information reliable? Well, given that the Iranian government cut SMS, phone, and satellite service, the opportunities for bloggers & twitterers to get their testimony out were scarce. The Iranian government was said to have used social media to track down users who seemed like “ringleaders” (or perhaps people the Ahmadinejad government had always wanted to silence) to throw them in prison. People were risking arrest, beatings, and being “disappeared” to upload videos and pictures and accounts of what happened. Erring on the side of too much rather than too little seemed to balance the need for any information to make it out of Iran, given the total lack of coverage in the early days of protest, otherwise known as #CNNFAIL.

I’m sure I passed along my fair share of rumors, rumors that originated on the ground in Iran from peoples’ families and friends reaching out to the Persian diaspora. I think some of that confusion is inevitable in a chaotic, fear-filled, fast-changing environment like Iran’s “Green Revolution.” I hope no one was harmed by anything I disseminated; at the same time, I think those in Iran were well aware of the major players in their government and could far more ably sift fact from fiction than I could.

Appallingly, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayotollah Khamanei, came out with a speech affirming the results of the election and certifying Ahmadinejad as the “rightfully” elected president of Iran. Was there ever really another possible outcome to the “recount”? Worse yet, he blamed Mousavi for the protests, and said any violence or deaths that occurred from Basijis (paramilitary forces) keeping the peace were the fault of Mousavi.

It’s all too depresingly familiar for those more accustomed to watching the hopeful uprising of a galvanized people demanding basic human rights, only to be brutally smacked down. I hadn’t ever felt so directly and immediately invested in such an uprising before. (One of the Iranian students I follow has braces, for chrissake.)

It’s hard to bear the truth that torture, endless imprisonment, or outright executions may be happening to dissenters now under cover of a government-authorized news blackout. Some accounts continue to trickle out from Iran, but it’s hard to know where Mousavi and his supporters will steer the reform movement next. Mousavi is perennially rumored to be in prison already or at the very least, threatened by house arrest. His main deputies have no doubt been intimidated into silence or jailed. While there’s much disagreement among Islamic clerics in Iran, many feel the largest and most obvious cracks in the legitimacy of the theocracy are already glaringly apparent to many.

I and many others watch with concern where this fledgling movement will go next. We hoped for Prague, but perhaps got Tiananmen. We can’t be sure yet. Looking at the situation in America, we had Gore v. Bush in ’00, more election mishegoss in ’04, and only in ’08 with Obama’s election did we approach a free and fair election. Until recently, certification of Senator Al Franken as rightfully elected official from Minnesota was still under challenge by that nuisance sore-loser Norm Coleman.

People outside Iran helped as best as they could. Those efforts are still continuing, although my impression is that much has gone deep underground and gotten extremely technical (the cyberwarfare aspect of anonymous posting, DDOS strikes and defenses against governmental attacks of same). I hope, along with many others, that the broad-based protests originating in Iran among many strata of society have permanently undermined the theocratic authority of the current Supreme Leader Khamanei and Ahmadinejad, his secular proxy.

Confessions

I’ve been away. Apologies, few-and-far-between blog readers.

Hiro Protagonist “graduated” from preschool, will officially be a kindergartner in the fall.

I’ve been writing elsewhere.

I’ve been tweeting elsewhere. (For real, my soul feels worn thin as a shard of bone–for two weeks straight I’ve tried to get word out about reformers’ protests in Iran over their strong feeling that their latest election was a sham. I’m not sure where this movement is going, or how much more I can contribute to it.)

I dislike much “women’s trade fiction.” Mary Higgins Clark? Why??

I’m thirsty for good news. I hope to have some soon.

I’d most like to curl up into a ball and hibernate from this non-stop feeling of exhaustion all the time. And yet I can’t. I need to throw myself out into the world over and over again.

So here I am. Discombobulated and scattered and dispirited. Nerve endings frayed. Restless and wretched.

I wish it were different.

I wish my son would like watching movies in the theatre. He says they’re too loud and overwhelming. He has a point. The other day I saw DRAG ME TO HELL (it wasn’t half as bad as I was tempted to crack that title equals the experience of going). I was tempted to half-plug my ears the whole time.

I’ve killed one strawberry and one tomato plant and many sugar snap pea seedings establishing my garden.

But we have 5 tomatoes on the vine, and many more passing from flower to fruit.

I’m tired. Tomorrow will be another day.

New LA Moms Blog Post 4

Lust at the GO Green Expo.