Free Republic

It seems that the MSM (mainstream media) are all a-twitter at the thought of us "pajama clad" bloggers poking our collective noses into their previously unchallenged realm. They are resentful when a site like http://littlegreenfootballs.com has the effrontry to break the "Rathergate" story, completely scooping their collective multimillion dollar media machines. It seems that editorializing and reporting should be left to those who are more qualified to perform such weighty and onerus tasks. Who are we to be self-delegating the right to speak our minds in public? How dare we venture to attempt to express ourselves in writing, just as...

Tories plan to beat ‘bias’ by bringing in bloggers By Philip Webster, Political Editor THE Conservative Right is to turn to new American campaigning techniques and the internet to try to revive the party and overcome what it sees as opposition from the metropolitan Establishment. Only weeks away from the general election, senior Conservatives will open a new front today in the battle for ideas by creating a website advocating “social conservatism”. It will invite people to bypass the media and put forward their own views on how the party should evolve. The faction behind it denies that it is...

As a conservative blogger, I must take exception to Tamara Baker's assertion that the conservative blogosphere and the liberal blogosphere have different agendas (Counterpoint, March 19). Baker's take appears to be that liberal bloggers like Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga) are honest and trustworthy heroes while conservative bloggers like Charles Johnson are vicious villains. Baker goes so far as to use quotes that suggest conservatives attack free and independent press and aim for the destruction of all objective reporting. Baker herself refers to Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler in describing the conservative blogosphere's attempt to discredit independent journalism. I will be...

In cyberspace, where anybody who cares to listen can hear you scream, the question of whether Terri Schiavo should live or die has spawned an endless shouting match. People who are passionate about maintaining Schiavo's life support have set up dozens of Internet sites, and the authors of Web logs dedicated to law, religion, ethics and politics are dissecting every aspect the case.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) issued proposed rules Thursday attempting to eliminate any restrictions on political blogging. The rules focus on paid online advertising and political e-mail instead. FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said the panel is still trying to determine whether a specific regulation exempting bloggers needs to be written, or if blogging would be protected by simply not including it in the proposed rules. "That's the sort of discussion we've been having, and however we resolve it, I think it's pretty clear that the result is not going to be bad for bloggers," Weintraub said in a statement. In...

The Federal Election Commission revealed yesterday that it plans to take what one of its commissioners termed a "relatively nonintrusive" approach to regulating political campaigns on the Internet. The agency, which is beginning to consider how and whether to restrict blogs, e-mail and other online activities, released a document describing the legal issues it plans to tackle over the next several months. Its "notice of proposed rulemaking," as it is known, indicates that the FEC is focusing much of its attention on whether to apply federal contribution limits on online political advertising campaigns. It also indicates that the six-member panel...

Since you’re reading this blog, you probably like it. And you probably want to keep reading it in the future. But that may not be possible. You see, I may go to jail for writing about politics. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has released a set of proposed “rules” for political speech on the Internet. These rules specify exactly what speech is, and isn’t, allowed on the Internet. I’m not kidding. They really do want to regulate political speech on the Internet. Bloggers, like yours truly, could be fined and punished for writing about a political candidate, if the FEC...

As federal election commissioners struggle for last-minute consensus on proposed rules for applying campaign-finance law to the Internet, some civil-liberties groups and election-finance watchdogs optimistically predict limited regulation. At press time, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) still had not released its draft rules on public communication and generic campaign activity. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Thursday, and the FEC usually releases its proposals ahead of time. "It's a complicated document," an FEC source said. Typically, commissioners try to resolve their differences before hearings for such politically charged issues, the source added. At issue is to what extent...

Red State's Mike Krempasky sends along the link to Instapundit's remarks at the IPDI conference, along with a heads-up to "[k]eep in mind - we could get the FEC proposed rules as early as tomorrow." While I am a skeptic on the level of genuine threat the FEC proposes to the blogosphere, twenty years of practice as a federal administrative lawyer both in and out of the federal government has taught me to pay particular attention to rulemakings at every step of the process --even if the proposed rules do not appear to present much of a threat to your...

In democratic countries, personal Web sites known as Weblogs have grown exponentially over the past few years. In the United States, for example, there are literally millions of "blogs." Not yet in the Middle East, even though there are many parallels in the region with what has made the phenomenon explode in the United States. For example, blogging technology is available to anyone with access to the Internet, it is cheap, indeed free, and content can easily be created in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other languages. While home-computer ownership is still embryonic, the deep suspicion of government-owned mainstream media has...

A brand new Pew survey of Internet users lets bloggers track the growing audience for their writing. The survey suggests that the total online potential audience (regular Internet users) has reached 40% of the US population, and that 7% of them (8 million) have created a weblog at some time and 27% (32 million Americans) claim to read weblogs. Other research indicates that, excluding the exploding Chinese market, US blog readership is about 40% of global blog readership, which means that the blog writer now has a target audience of 80 million readers worldwide. Of that number, 6 million Americans...

Pseudo-journalistic Web sites are another way conservatives get around “the filter” of mainstream media. It’s a new medium, but, for the Republican Party, it’s an old story. During one especially hectic week in mid-February, the Internet took three scalps in what appeared to be unrelated events. Liberal bloggers forced Talon News White House correspondent James D. Guckert, a k a “Jeff Gannon,” to resign after it was revealed that he was writing under a false name for a Republican activist group (GOPUSA), that he was not really a journalist at all, and that he had posed nude on the Internet...

Blogs. The very word elicits tension. Or so it seemed at the recent Politics Online Conference 2005, put on last week by the Institute for Democracy & the Internet at the George Washington University. A breakout session titled "Tracking the Buzz through Blogs" demonstrated the intense emotionalism embedded in this new medium, as well as the intellect and diversity of sanity among the men and women (but mostly men) behind the keyboards. The session's panelists were sane enough: Peter Daou, formerly of the Kerry-Edward campaign, now of the Daou Report, Patrick Ruffini, webmaster for Bush-Cheney '04, Nicco Mele formerly of...

Trying to Extract a Drama From the Blog of an Iraqi By JASON ZINOMAN "Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq" is not a very good play, but it's worth your attention for two reasons. It's the only political drama in New York written from the point of view of an Iraqi who lived through the American invasion, and, for better or worse, it inaugurates an entirely new (and seemingly inevitable) theatrical genre - the blog play. Melding two chic cultural forms, the documentary drama and the blog, the Six Figures Theater Company has turned the online writings of Riverbend, the...

The answer to that question was once easy. Until the Internet, journalists were typically attached to an established organization that could afford to own and run a newspaper, magazine, radio or TV station, TV network, or cable news outlet. Their credibility was both individual and institutional. For all of its flaws, and despite often high entry costs, this marketplace of ideas has flourished. Journalists know that transparency and fairness in how they cover the news are critical. But in the Internet age, the cost of distributing news has become minimal. Almost anyone can set up a web log ("blog") or...

At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best ... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK]. "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to...

Bloggers should enjoy traditional press freedoms and not face regulation as political groups, lawmakers and online journalists said Friday. In separate letters, Democratic lawmakers and Internet commentators urged the Federal Election Commission to make sure that political Web sites that serve as focal points for political discussion, such as Wonkette.com and Freerepublic.com, don't have to comply with campaign-finance rules. "Curtailing blogs and other online publications will dampen the impact of new voices in the political process and will do a disservice to the millions of voters who rely on the Web for original, insightful political commentary," said the Online Coalition,...

Liberal Bloggers Reaching Out to Major Media By JONATHAN D. GLATER ven as online pundits criticize traditional news organizations as slow, biased and technologically challenged, a group of bloggers is trying to use old-fashioned telephone conference calls to share their ideas with newspaper and television journalists. The bloggers, who describe themselves as liberal or progressive, say the conference calls are intended to counter what they regard as the much stronger influence of conservative pundits online. Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, the host of the two calls so far, views them as a step toward getting their reports out to mainstream...

Exactly who is a journalist these days? This is a question suddenly being asked by working journalists, news executives, commentators and columnists, journalism professors and now, in the wake of calls for national shield laws to protect reporters' conversations with confidential sources, even by the courts. In the United States, journalism remains an occupation without licensing, without required formal training or certification, and without a commonly accepted code of conduct. The rise of blogging, an erosion of traditional boundaries between reporting and commentary, and the blurring of news and entertainment by some media outlets makes it easier to describe what...

When Dan Rather signs off tonight, ending 24 years as anchor of the "CBS Evening News," it will mark a changing of the guard in more ways than one. Yes, CBS will need a new anchor. (Bob Schieffer will fill in until a permanent replacement is named.) But Rather's departure also symbolizes the rise of a new player in the world of media and politics that was not even a glimmer in a science-fiction writer's imagination when Rather first took the anchor's chair: the Internet phenomenon known as the blogosphere. Blogs, especially the Twin Cities-based Power Line, may have helped...