Here’s the comment that I posted in response to this perspective with respect to McCain’s war policies:

When we talk about McCain’s potential impact on the economy, we need to include some common sense, Main Street perspectives and not only the prognostications of entrenched Wall Street insiders. I don’t really support any of the presidential candidates, but it seems like McCain’s steadfast financial support of the war has really increased the national debt. We have spent over 528 billion dollars on the Iraq war so far - that’s over 528,000 million dollars. So I think it’s very hard to make the case that McCain’s policy of military spending is good for our economy. War is very, very expensive, and what we purchase are not capital investments or new markets, but more guns, blood, and enemies.

Before we decide on whether McCain or Obama is better for the economy, we should answer the following questions with respect to military spending:

What fraction of the national budget goes to military spending, is this an appropriate fraction, and how have the presidential candidates voted with respect to military spending?

Which presidential candidate is most likely to increase military spending?

Which presidential candidate is most likely to decrease military spending?

Which bills did McCain vote for to finance the Iraq War?

Which bills did Obama vote for to finance the Iraq War?

Did other presidential candidates, such as Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel vote for any bills that financed the Iraq War?

And of course, we need to ask questions about other kinds of spending as well. How will the candidates spend money on transportation infrastructure, health care, the environment, and energy? To improve our economy, we not only need to stop spending money on services we do not need, but we also need to start spending money on services we do need. With respect to national security, we need to seriously reflect on whether our military spending is increasing our security or decreasing it. I am not convinced that the Iraq war has improved our national security. We must ask ourselves, was it worth it? We must ask ourselves, did the Iraq War really improve our economy, our quality of life, and our moral standing? And, we must ask ourselves, which politicians voted to go to war, voted to stay at war, and voted to forget the war?

With all of this in mind, it seems as though we must reform our initial question. The deeper question is:

Is there a viable presidential candidate who is for our economy?

You can check out my development site here.

“Violent crimes of beating, smashing, looting and arson broke out in Lhasa in early March, but Western media organizations such as CNN and BBC have churned out untrue and distorted reports of the event. Please sign your name here to lodge your strong protest.”

According to the China Daily, on 4/5/08, the online petition site had received about 1.14 million signatures. Today, 4/8/08, only 3 days later, the site claims to have 2.83 million signatures. If these figures are correct, and we assume a linear progression, the site gathered approximately .53333 million signatures per day - about half a million signatures per day. China Daily claimed that 20% of these signatures on Friday came from the U.S. Since I cannot read Chinese, and BabelFish is buggy, I was unable to confirm this signature distribution statistic on the website. Moreover, it is not clear how we could confirm that the signatures are authentic. We have no way to verify that the names on this list are attached to real people.

The online petition site was written in Chinese, largely limiting its signees and readership to Chinese speakers. Why would China create a petition that criticizes the Western media in a language difficult for the Western media to understand? Because the the primary target of the petition is not the Western media; it is the Chinese people. Neither of the English versions of the state-controlled media outlets provided links to the online petition. Both indicated that a link could be found on Sina.com, another state-approved Chinese media portal. Apparently, Sina.com hosts the petition, but links to the petition cannot be found on the English version of the website. I found the link to the portal on a physics website, PhysOrg.

To view the petition site in Chinese, click here.
To view the petition site in English (translated by BabelFish), click here (note: BabelFish’s translation may limit site functonality).

China Petition Signature Distribution

When designing a web-based interface for a database, one can create a list of words called stop-words, which will not be included as search terms. Stop-words are often used to filter out vulgar language, such as curse words. Apparently, a similar filtering mechanism was applied to the word ‘abortion’.

Every form of censorship is a political issue, some more controversial than others. With database censorship, users are allowed to freely express their search terms, but the search results will be filtered to remove censored information. Instead of the sender being censored, the replier is censored.

What are some other recent examples of database censorship?

After the lecture, a young Chinese man (let’s call him Tom) asked Nick his thoughts about how the Western media distorted its coverage of the Chinese government’s recent reactions to the protests in Tibet. Tom claimed that the Western media misrepresented the violence in Tibet. Tom claimed that CNN and other Western media news outlets misrepresented China as an oppressive aggressor against the Tibetan people. According to Tom, CNN showed videos of Nepalese police beating Tibetans as they described China’s crackdown on the Tibetans, thereby confusing Nepalese violence with Chinese violence.

Tom also claimed that the Tibetans slaughtered some Chinese with “long knives”, that they locked some Chinese girls in a hut and set fire to it, and other acts of terrible violence. I’m not sure if any of this is true. I am sure that many people have very different perceptions of what is going on in Tibet. I know that manipulating images can reframe a news story. Cropping, resequencing, and recoloring images can profoundly change its apparent meaning. With respect to the Tibet-China conflict, we probably have violence on many fronts. It’s not necessarily equal violence on each side, but the media typically bifurcates the argument into two positions, and like lawyers for their clients, these images often distort the truth for just causes.

Nick provided the example of the Dying Rooms (watch it here ), where several British filmmakers took hidden cameras into the orphanages of China and then created a documentary purporting the existence of dying rooms, where Chinese children are left to die. The documentary is extremely disturbing. Clearly, Chinese children are suffering. Killing and torturing children in this fashion is anathema, and those events should be documented, admonished, and prevented.

While many of the images do not lie, the devil is in the details, in how these media artifacts reframe history, a projected history which in many cases, may have never occurred. Did most Chinese orphanages have dying rooms for little girls? Probably not. The documentary showcased torture, neglect, and murder, sins of both commission and omission. Girls were probably mistreated more than boys, but many boys also suffered tremendously. In many ways, the orphanages depicted were dying rooms, but not just for girls and not solely for the purpose of killing the children. The documentary was intended to save the children, a just cause, but it distorted the media, media which was already sufficient to make its case without those distortions.

Similarly, increased autonomy for the people of Tibet is a just cause, and the means to that end also matter. The medium by which we make the case for change must also do justice to the events which they oppose. As a method of persuasion, we are often tempted to exaggerate the truth, and distort the media, either through theatric gesticulation or an inflected voice or general terms that ignore the hairy exceptions. What does it mean to distort our media for just causes? Are we doing more than lying when we fabricate the past? I think the case can be made that media manipulation remakes reality. By reframing fiction as fact, we often experience its effects as if it were a fact. On what else besides the media can we base our beliefs about experiences we do not directly encounter? And with what else besides media can we move closer to directly experience that past and distant present?

We are not too far from Plato’s cave, even as we watch the drama unfold in the shadows of China and Tibet. Even Tom and Nick, who feel the heat, are not that close to the fire. It bears repeating, again and again and again: the media matters. Media shapes our beliefs. Our beliefs motivate our actions. Our actions shape the media. Since media production is integral to all action, we must be careful how we produce media. If we are to have any ethical knowledge, it must address the media. Media ethics is not a rare species of prescription, but at the heart of metaethics. Whether we crop this region from the picture, or crop this ethnic minority from political power, we are presupposing similar general ethical statements about our media experience. If the means matter for just ends, then the media matters for just causes.

Consider the waterboarding bill that Bush vetoed. According to the Washington Post article Bush Announces Veto of Waterboarding Ban, George W. Bush vetoed a bill which bans waterboarding, a torture technique which involves drowning a detainee in a controlled manner. Dan Eggen, its author, tells us some shocking information about the voting records of some of the presidential candidates. He tells us that John McCain voted against the ban on waterboarding, while having claimed to reject torture based on his experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Also, Hilliary Clinton and Barack Obama failed to vote on the bill.

As a citizen journalist, I want to read the bill for myself and review the voting records. Unfortunately the Washington Post article does not mention the bill. I searched for ‘waterboarding’ at OpenCongress.org and Thomas.gov, but did not find a bill that had been voted on by the Senate. It may be one of the bills I found, but there is no way to be sure that I picked the correct bill without asking the author of the article, Dan Eggen. So I just emailed him. I’m waiting on his response.

I tried searching for ‘waterboarding’ bill on Google News and found many articles that also fail to name the bill. Although many of these articles are produced and distributed by major newspapers and media organizations, none of them name or hyperlink to the legislation. And many do not even name their author!

• (USA Today) Bush to veto waterboarding bill by: anonymous AP writer
• (Washington Post) Vote Against Waterboarding Bill Called Consistent by: Dan Eggen and Michael D. Shear
• (Associated Press) Bush to Veto Waterboarding Bill by: Jennifer Loven
• (New York Times) Bush Uses Veto on C.I.A. Tactics to Affirm Legacy by: Steven Lee Myers
• (Baltimore Sun) Democrats condemn veto of torture bill by: James Oliphant
• (Reuters) Bush vetoes U.S. bill outlawing CIA waterboarding by: anonymous Reuters writer
• (AFP) Bush vetoes interrogation limits by: anonymous AFP writer
• (Voice of America News) President Bush Vetoes Waterboarding Ban by: anonymous VOA writer
• (BBC) Bush vetoes interrogation limits by: anonymous BBC writer

All of these articles are written by “professional” corporate journalists, and none of them adhere to the simple professional journalistic standard of citing your public sources. Many do not even take responsibility for the article by publishing their name and contact information. How hard is it to name the bill you write about and hyperlink to its text on Thomas.gov or OpenCongress.org? How hard is it to publish your name and contact information? Not hard at all. What we are receiving is not “professional” corporate journalism, but lazy corporate journalism.

Write emails to the aforementioned “professional” corporate journalists and their editors. Demand that they provide the names of the legislation they write about and hyperlinks to the text of that legislation. Demand that they, as journalists, publish their own names and contact information.

It’s really sad to have to remind the corporate media to publish this basic information.

“Nader didn’t authorize the invasion of Iraq. Hillary Clinton, John McCain and George W. Bush did. Nader didn’t continue to fund the illegal and immoral war. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and George W. Bush did. So voting for Nader is not voting for war.

Voting for Obama, Hillary, or McCain is a war vote. It’s a vote for continuing our bloated military budget. Over 50% of our discretionary federal taxes still go to the Department of Defense. Are the Democrats talking about redistributing some of this war money to genuine universal healthcare, science, or education? No way! That would require washing the blood off their hands.

Who has the independence to free us from our dependency on this military industrial complex? Who can seriously elevate the public discourse and challenge our assumptions about American power? At the moment, I only see one serious presidential candidate: Ralph Nader.”

Obama, Hillary, and John McCain share a similar voting record when it comes to funding an illegal and immoral war, a record which is not shared by Ralph Nader and many other pro-peace candidates, like Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul.

In their report, Eyes on the Prize: Presidential Candidates on Iraq, Iran and Nuclear Weapons, they omit the perspectives of pro-peace presidential candidates Mike Gravel, Ron Paul, and Ralph Nader. And they omit the perspectives of many third party and independent candidates. The report only includes the positions of John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama on the grounds that they are they are the leading candidates as measured by vote counts.

According to their methods section, they only include candidates that meet the following criteria:

a) The candidate polls at five percent or greater for one month in an early primary state or nationally; and
b) The candidate is actively campaigning

So I called the FCNL at 800-630-1330. The man on the phone was very nice and he directed me to the report. I told him I was very concerned about the methodology of the report. I asked him to raise my concerns to the relevant persons at the FCNL, which he said he would. In particular, I asked the FCNL to reconsider their criteria for including candidates based on polling numbers because public polls depend on public knowledge of the candidates and public knowledge of the candidates has been undermined by corporate media censorship of the candidates. I told them how CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, and the Des Moines Register have censored Kucinich and Gravel, by excluding them from the presidential debates. I told them that Ron Paul has also faced censorship from the corporate media. Many other third party and independent candidates are also routinely censored by the corporate media.

I told them that since I have written about the corporate media censorship of these pro-peace candidates, and that I have a “WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER” bumpersticker, I am very concerned about further censorship of these candidates in their presidential reports / voter guides.

It is important to critique those you generally support on important issues like war and peace, and it is especially important to critique organizations that represent egalitarian and peaceful ideals when they systematically censor those who support those ideals. As a non-partisan organization that lobbies for peace, the FCNL should have used a more inclusive methodology for its presidential candidate report. For example, they could have emailed an online survey to all of the presidential candidates to gather their perspectives.

For historical purposes, I’ve archived an copy of the report, Eyes on the Prize: Presidential Candidates on Iraq, Iran and Nuclear Weapons.

Chrisopher Barr, a senior editor at Yahoo offered his dream list of information innovations. One of these ideas struck me: self-identifying content. This is related to my thesis about online petitions. The idea is that the digital artifact indicates how it was created and who created it. In a sense, self-identifying content automates signature signing. Are you signing a document if you consent to it signing itself? Does a digital artifact express your personality if you allow it to decide which parts of your personality to record? Barr was not asking these questions, but they explore the idea of self-identifying content.

Barr also asked us to come up with technologies to manage behavior tracking. He suggested that behavior tracking was all the rage these days, and that Yahoo would love to be able to predict and modify user behavior. I didn’t have a chance to ask him if Yahoo would be willing to publish all of the data they were gathering from an unsuspecting public, or whether it was ethical to manipulate people based on secret statistics.

However, I did have the opportunity to publicly ask Anton Kast, lead scientist at Digg, to clarify his claim that the Digg rating system was egalitarian, but not democratic. Kast said that he thought egalitarianism was a “shameful” form of democracy. Apparently, Kast thinks that Digg protects individual speech, whether this speech is inane or brilliant. He made it very clear that Digg is not designed for informed discussion, but is designed for popular discussion. Moreover he argues that Digg technologically provides a fair popular discussion, protecting the chance for any person to be heard by everyone. He thinks that democracy requires more than popular discussion, which I agree with. But I am not sure that popular discussion entails egalitarianism. Digg is not designed for egalitarianism because it does not aim to make everyone listen to everyone; Digg is designed for everyone to listen to a few people, people that have won a popularity contest. From what I gathered from Kast, Digg is agnostic to the cultural and epistemic norms that govern popularity, with one major exception, pornography. Digg will not publish pornography, but happily publishes controversy, even if it is only rumor. I do not know the extent of misinformation on Digg. I do know that Kast accepts the legitimacy of vulgar popular culture, and argues that Digg protects its rightful place on the Net.

I also had several opportunities to publicly ask critical questions about corporate media and democratic design. After the online editor of CNN debuted his I-Report website, I publicly asked him about the business realities of citing news sources with the simplest of web technologies, a technology that is not available in print: hyperlinks. I asked him why CNN did not provide hyperlinks to the legislation they report on. This seems like an incredible oversight and departure from journalistic ethics. For those of us who care about rational discourse, we need access to external justification. We need access to the reasoning behind a report in order to evaluate its bias. The profession of journalism has a bias for the truth and these ideals can be largely realized through hyperlinks. Citing news sources with hyperlinks is not rocket science. I want to know why CNN and other online news sources ommit hyperlinks to their news sources, especially when obvious and accessible primary sources, such as federal legislation, are available online.

During the wine and dine session after the symposium, I had the opportunity to debate Michael Skoler at American Public Media about the concept of citizen journalism and his effort to use citizens as a fount for factual input, using a trademarked method called Public Insight Journalism®. I was expecting Skoler to argue that Public Insight Journalism, while not a fully developed model of citizen journalism, was nonetheless an early institutionalized prototype of citizen journalism. Much to my chagrin and suprise, Skoler disclaimed the trajectory and intent of citizen journalism for American Public Media. Instead of highlighting the similarities between citizen journalism and public broadcasting, Skoler made an effort to distance Public Insight Journalism from the concept of citizen journalism. Skoler wanted to keep a strict boundary between citizen authorship of news and citizen information for news. Why is Skoler and American Public Media so resistant to the idea of citizen authorship of news? Why do they want to centralize control of how the public voice is filtered? What are they really afraid of in letting the public reclaim their brand? In talking with Skoler, I was shocked by Skoler’s conception the public journalism.

In summary, Skoler maintains that his organization does not do citizen journalism, that reporting is not primarily about public education, that reporting does not need to negotiate or prioritize the truth with the public, but that public journalism at its heart is about fact-finding, and that it can and should be done by professionals. I pointed out that he was assuming that citizen journalists are not and cannot be professionals, that they are essentially amateurs and that corporate journalists are essentially professionals. I challenged his conception of professionalism - noting that professional journalism has both economic and epistemic dimensions. I argued that a person is primarily a professional in virtue of their process of creating knowledge, and not by the sole fact that this process pays the bills. I argued that professionals maintain certain values and practices which demonstrate those values. For example, I contended that professional journalists value the truth and that they strive to report it by citing sources, double checking their claims, and communicating their findings in persistent media, media that can be archived and reviewed.

Skoler seemed to agree with many of these professional standards, but he maintained his view that public journalism should still be controlled by a relatively few corporate professionals. He argued that citizens, in general, do not want to do the hard work of journalism, so a few corporate professionals must do it, professionals that work for non-profit or for-profit corporations. I pointed out that public journalism is fundamentally about civic engagement, and that there are many duties we may not want to do, but which we must do in order to live in a civil society. Amongst those duties, is our responsibility to publish our most pressing concerns so that we can make the most informed decisions about how to live. Citizen journalism, at its core is a civic institution in which the public publishes information to improve civil society. We do not need, as I argued to Skoler, any private judiciary of editors to steer the news. We do not need a caste of philosopher kings to think for the people.

While much of the public is uninformed about the overall state of affairs in the world, most of the public can make informed perspectives about the world. We may not know every angle of an issue, but we can learn enough about an issue to contribute in a meaningful way to an informed world view. It is possible and probable for the general population to analyze and synthesize the news, news which frames and shapes the way we live. But we need to raise the standards of civic education and discourse. We need to stop pre-empting the potential of public discourse. Instead of predicting and accepting ignorance and neglect, we need to remedy this social pattern by persuasively demanding universal education and participation. In general, as citizens, we need to remind each other of our information gathering and sense-making capabilities and responsibilities.

Some say that information wants to be free; I agree, but I would add that people also want to be free, and that their freedom is not an autonomous affair, but relies on the cooperation and communication of pressing public information. It relies on our ability to share the news with each other. Some argue that we must save corporate journalism to save journalistic ethics. I argue that we must liberate journalists from corporate rule in order to preserve and promote an ethical profession of journalism. Some argue that citizen journalism is basically a way for amateurs to help the news room. I argue that citizen journalism is about citizens becoming journalists and journalists becoming citizens, where citizenship is not a national or geographic status, but one’s status as a civic–minded individual, working for the public good.

To be a citizen does not require any overt congregation; a solitary man can be a citizen if he works for the well-being of random strangers. And the community inherent in civic participation does not sound the death knells of individualism. Community is about understanding and respecting others, people who are necessarily different than you; it does not imply uncontested consensus or robotic majority rule. In fact, citizens should debate with each other in a constructive and respectful dialectic. They should challenge and critique entrenched ideological majorities. Citizen journalists exemplify these ideals.

As we continue to think about computational journalism and its relationship to citizen journalism, we should consider ways in which we can empower citizens with tools that encode the ideals of the journalistic profession. We should move beyond the debate of whether ordinary people can produce high quality news. They can. We should not devote our time to designing private corporate hierarchies of information gathering and sensemaking. Those already exist. We need to focus our creative energy on new ways to organize, fund, and network citizen-generated media. As we move in this direction, we will have to confront our deep-seated stereotypes of the public. But this process of rethinking public networks is not news to those who use the Internet. As we design and configure computational tools to unify our divided intellectual labor, we will be redesigning and reconfiguring society: Technologists vs. Artists, Professionals vs. Amateurs, and Persons vs. Corporations. Instead of averaging these social roles, or specializing in these roles en mass, let us individually cherry pick the best aspects of each to design a more democratic culture.