Public Please

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PoliChat


By Will Riley

April 22nd, 2008 · No Comments

For my final project, I’m working on PoliChat, a web-based tool for large-scale democratic intergroup chat. It is intended to facilitate communication between groups. For example, citizens and politicians can create groups and democratically chat with each other.

You can check out my […]

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→ No CommentsTags: Citizen Journalism · Education · Media Ethics

China’s Grand Petition Against The Western Media


By Will Riley

April 7th, 2008 · 8 Comments

According to several state-controlled Chinese media outlets, including China Daily and the China Tibet Information Center, thousands of Chinese people are signing an online petition against bias in the Western media. In particular, the petition responds to the West media’s coverage of the […]

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→ 8 CommentsTags: Corporate Media · Human Rights · Petitions · Political Censorship · State Media · War

Database Censorship


By Will Riley

April 5th, 2008 · No Comments

According to the New York Times’s “Health Database Was Set Up To Ignore ‘Abortion‘”, managers of PopLine, a federally funded reproductive health database at Johns Hopkins University, removed the word “abortion” from the list of potential search terms. The article reports that the […]

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→ No CommentsTags: Education · Media Ethics · Political Censorship

Distorting Media For Just Causes


By Will Riley

April 4th, 2008 · No Comments

Today, I had the good fortune to attend a lecture on NGOs and civil society in China by Nick Young. As a journalist in China, Nick provided detailed coverage of the emerging non-governmental organization sector in China. He unpacked some of the […]

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→ No CommentsTags: Human Rights · Media Ethics · Political Censorship

Journalists Do Not Name Waterboarding Bill That Bush Vetoed


By Will Riley

March 8th, 2008 · 3 Comments

Have you read about a bill in an online news article and wanted to read the bill? Good luck because most online news articles neither name the bill nor hyperlink to it.
Consider the waterboarding bill that Bush vetoed. According to […]

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→ 3 CommentsTags: Accountability · Citizen Journalism · Corporate Media · Human Rights · War

Voting For Nader Is NOT Voting For War


By Will Riley

February 28th, 2008 · 1 Comment

I recently read “Nader Announces Pick for Vice President“, and posted this comment (which has been slightly modified to include the voting record of John McCain) to respond to partisan Democrats who blame Ralph Nader for the Iraq War and the prospects of additional […]

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→ 1 CommentTags: Accountability · Education · Elections · Human Rights · War

Quakers And Political Censorship


By Will Riley

February 26th, 2008 · No Comments

While reading an article on DemocracyRising.us, I was surprised and disappointed to discover that the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a non-partisan Quaker lobbying organization, has engaged in the political censorship of pro-peace candidates.
In their report, Eyes on the Prize: Presidential […]

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→ No CommentsTags: Cell Phone Activism · Corporate Media · Elections · Petitions · Political Censorship

Citizen Journalism At The Computational Journalism Symposium


By Will Riley

February 22nd, 2008 · 2 Comments

So far, the computational journalism symposium at Georgia Tech has been thought-provoking. It has provided an opportunity for me to provoke the corporate media with democratic theory.
Chrisopher Barr, a senior editor at Yahoo offered his dream list of information innovations. One of […]

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→ 2 CommentsTags: Citizen Journalism · Corporate Media · Education · Petitions

The Empty Politics Of Change And Experience


By Will Riley

February 20th, 2008 · No Comments

Change or experience?
Change We Can Believe In. I Believe In Words. Our Words Inspire. We Can Do Better America! Participate. Hope. Dream. I Need You. We Need Each Other! We Are Many And We Are […]

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→ No CommentsTags: Corporate Media · Elections · Political Censorship

The Piggy Bank Press


By Will Riley

February 2nd, 2008 · No Comments

To sustain the citizen journalism movement and end the corporate media’s censorship of public opinion, we need a sound model for public finance. By public finance, I do not mean the largely involuntary and undemocratic form of funding often given the moniker which […]

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→ No CommentsTags: Accountability · Citizen Journalism