Free Republic

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MEDIA MATTERS Citizen reporters who broke story jump on 'independent' report The weblogs that first revealed CBS News used phony documents as the basis for an election-season piece about President Bush's National Guard service are in full force after release of the network's independent-panel report yesterday, with most expressing surprise at its harsh, detailed criticism of news personnel but lamenting it couldn't see political bias driving the story. "We're disappointed that the panel claimed there was not enough proof that those involved had political motivations," said RatherBiased.com co-editor Matthew Sheffield. But he surmised, "If the panel had made such a...

Earlier this year, CBS aired a now-infamous 60 Minutes episode in which Rather presented typed memoranda supposedly written over 30 years ago by President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard commander, the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. The documents purported to show that Bush received preferential treatment while serving in the military. Hours after the broadcast, well-known bloggers like Little Green Footballs, Power Line, and the widely known Instapundit — as well as NRO's Kerry Spot & The Corner — were casting doubt on the documents’ authenticity. As the controversy grew, they posted frequent updates and became virtual...

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the mistreatment in prison of cyberdissidents and webloggers after an Iranian committee report concluded that public confessions of two of them, Omid Memarian (photo right) and Rozbeh Mir Ebrahimi (photo left), were obtained under duress. "We fear that the authorities are succeeding in purging the web of all critical content through brutality, intimidation and censorship," the worldwide press freedom organisation said. "In a country in which weblogs and news sites have flourished in the past few years such a setback would be a catastrophe for freedom of expression." Confirmation that Memarian and Mir Ebrahimi were...

One gee-whiz product on display last night in the ballroom of the MGM Grand Casino signaled where the personal publishing trend known as blogging is headed. Think video. Think regular Joes and Marys acting like Dan Rather, broadcasting personal video newscasts from their kitchen counters and living room sofas. Mark Randall, founder of Serious Magic, shows the video-creation screen of his new video-blogging software program, which generates a personal video that looks much like a regular TV newcast ....

I'm going to post the text as soon as I get some HTML issues worked out, but in the meantime, you can download the report as a Microsoft Word document by clicking here. UPDATE: Text after the jump. TO: John Robinson [editor], Ann Morris [managing editor], Mark Sutter [Greensboro city editor]FROM: Lex Alexander DATE: Dec. 23, 2004RE: News-Record.com as public square A week ago, you asked me to prepare recommendations for making our flagship Web site more of an online town square or public square. This report includes that list, loosely organized by type of recommendation. Where appropriate, I've...

Americans are becoming avid blog readers, with 32 million getting hooked in 2004, according to new research. The survey, conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, showed that blog readership has shot up by 58% in the last year. Some of this growth is attributable to political blogs written and read during the US presidential campaign. Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found. Blogs, or web logs, are online spaces in which people can publish their thoughts, opinions or spread news events in their own words....

Bloggers offer witness accounts, ways to help quake and tsunami victims 2 hours, 50 minutes ago NEW YORK (AFP) - Blogs from around the world are offering instant witness reports from the region affected by the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that the traditional media cannot match, as well as links to relief groups for readers seeking to provide immediate help. AFP Photo Blogs became an important means of communication and information following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States. The phenomenon has now reached global proportions with the explosion of Asian blog sites and sites dedicated...

Power Line Named Blog of the Year: TIME also names Power Line its Blog of the Year. “Before this year, blogs were a curiosity, a cult phenomenon, a faintly embarrassing hobby on the order of ham radio and stamp collecting. But in 2004, blogs unexpectedly vaulted into the pantheon of major media, alongside TV, radio and, yes, magazines, and it was Power Line, more than any other blog, that got them there,” writes TIME’s Lev Grossman.

For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs. The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help. There was the simple photo of a startlingly blue boat smashed against a beachside palm in Jaffna. "Every house and fishing boat has been smashed, the entire length of the east coast," wrote Fred Robart, who posted...

If you want to find out more information about this week's tsunami of biblical proportions in Southeast Asia and how you can help the victims, the best place to go is a new blog in the Indian Ocean region that's compiling everything from requests by organizations seeking donations to victim lists. http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com Blogs are at the forefront of the tsunami recovery effort. While traditional media drags awaiting publication, and government hotlines jam or go unanswered, bloggers have hopped into the fray, providing needed information to relatives desperate to find loved ones and those hoping to join the rescue efforts. One...

Two years ago, I wrote a column about “blogs” (web logs) because they were the most interesting new Internet phenomenon I had come across.  Essentially, they are personal web sites that offer people daily (even hourly) commentary on current events or whatever they feel like writing about.  Last year at this time I wrote another column on this topic, so I guess it has become something of a tradition for me.  This is my latest discussion of the blog phenomenon.  In my first commentary, I noted that journalists like Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and Matt Drudge, as well as...

Blogging a disaster The catastrophe around the Indian Ocean• December 26, 2004 | 4:00 PM ET Earlier this weekend, people were worrying about an asteroid that may hit the earth in 2029. But then we faced something more immediate, in the form of an earthquake and tidal wave that killed people all around the Indian Ocean basin. As I write this, the death toll is over 11,000 and is sure to grow as more reports come in. Bloggers have been on the job here, and you can read lots of first-hand reports via Malaysian bloggers Rajan Rishyakaran, Jeff Ooi, and...

Memorial Day weekend 2002. A fiftysomething minneapolis lawyer named John Hinderaker (sounds like "indie rocker") sits down in his kitchen with a laptop and some simple software and cooks up a website. He bangs out a generic first posting: "This is a new blog dedicated to current events and any topics that are of interest to me." Fair enough. His daughter, 13, is hanging out in the kitchen with her best friend. The friend throws out a name for the blog: Power Line. Sure, that'll work. A lot of people, including Dan Rather and any number of executives at CBS,...

Time magazine has named a Person of the Year — it's that Bush fellow you may have heard about. (He's been in all the papers.) The choice may strike some as smart or obvious, but you just know some staffers wanted to give the honor to those new single-serve coffee-pod machines. Hey, Time named the computer in '82, so there's precedent for giving the honor to an inanimate object. And the coffee-pod machines have the added virtue of NOT BEING THAT USURPING CHIMP! But to no avail. Trying to push from their minds the thought of Michael Moore gently weeping...

As noted below, Time Magazine has named us "Blog of the Year" in the issue which hits the newsstands tomorrow. (The Man of the Year, of course, is President Bush.) The article about us, by Lev Grossman, is very good. The photo that accompanies it, I'm not so sure about: Grossman's article describes how we started the site, tells a bit about us personally, and relates the story of The Sixty-First Minute, the post on the forged CBS memos that the Trunk began on the morning of September 9. In the article, I describe the Sixty-First Minute as the most...

Courtesy of Newsweek, mainstream media’s pet blogger Wonkette takes a cute little slap at the bloggers who broke the Dan Rather fraud story: Fast Chat: The Wonkette. What did you think of the bloggers’ role in the Dan Rather affair?I think they did a disservice to the debate because they made the debate about the documents and not about the president of the United States. There was another half to that story that had to do with verifiable events of what Bush may have been up to. While blogs like LGF were doing a “disservice to the debate” by exposing...

MINNEAPOLIS President George W. Bush may be Time's Person of the Year, but two Twin Cities lawyers are behind the magazine's first-ever Blog of the Year. John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson founded their blog, Power Line, in 2002 and earned notoriety this year for fomenting skepticism of a "60 Minutes" report on Bush's service in the National Guard. "In 2004, blogs unexpectedly vaulted into the pantheon of major media, alongside TV, radio and, yes, magazines, and it was Power Line, more than any other blog, that got them there," said the Time story, on newsstands Monday. The word blog is...

A fraudulent document and a fallen television icon propelled a trio of online writers to Internet stardom earlier this year when they used their Web site, Power Line, to help uncover the truth of a fake story shown on CBS' "60 Minutes." The rise to celebrity status was validated Sunday when Time magazine named Twin Cities-based Power Line the "Blog of the Year," the first such award from the magazine. "It's so gratifying," said Scott Johnson, a Minneapolis banker and one of three authors at the site (www.powerlineblog.com). "It's totally unexpected." The story of how an online publication from the...

One of the first sex scandals of the blogosphere ended, of course, in a book deal. In May, Ana Marie Cox, the Internet gossip whose Web log, Wonkette, focuses on Washington, published a link to another blogger who called herself the Washingtonienne. In the blog, Washingtonienne, a Capitol Hill employee, used a Senate computer to post intimate details about her experience sleeping with six different men, some of whom were paying for her favors. Washingtonienne listed her partners by their initials and occupations, from the married ''Chief of Staff at one of the gov agencies, appointed by Bush'' to her...