aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Going to bat for Obama
We can only hope the tide is turning and people will really push back against the media machine.
After AP reporter Nedra Pickler wrote a news story highlighting how some fringe Republican operatives were raising questions about Sen. Barack Obama’s patriotism, angry readers dispatched nearly 15,000 electronic letters protesting the piece. Why? Because instead of providing balance and context, which is what good journalism does, the article simply offered a platform for Obama’s opponents to roll out their smears, to broadcast their dark doubts about the senator’s character. [...]
What prompted the organized outpouring of angst last week against the AP was when the website Firedoglake took action, embraced a new organizing tool, tapped into a wellspring of enthusiasm for Obama, and pointed angry readers not in the direction of the AP itself, but toward their local newspaper clients. Why? Because newspapers are more responsive to complaints filed by nearby readers, and because the newspapers pay the AP’s bills as newswire customers.
The riddle, though, was how to help readers contact hundreds of individual newspapers nationwide. “It’s like trying to wrestle an octopus,” says Jane Hamsher, founder of FDL. The solution centered on customizing a software tool that allowed online activists to effortlessly contact their local daily. The tool FDL modified was created by the online communications firm Blue State Digital. Readers simply entered their ZIP code into an on-screen box. The next screen displayed the local newspaper (or newspapers) in their region to be contacted and asked readers to enter their name and other personal information to be sent to the newspaper. The screen provided readers with pre-approved text (i.e., “I hope that in the future we can expect reporting that focuses on the candidate’s positions rather than trying to call into question how much they love the country they tirelessly serve.")
If they wanted to, though, readers could personalize, or create, the letter themselves. Approximately half the letter writers in the FDL campaign wrote their own text. With the third click, the reader’s letter was sent to the newspaper.
FDL’s call to action was posted February 25 and was quickly trumpeted by fellow bloggers, who urged their readers to participate.
The results, according to FDL, as of March 3: 14,252, letters sent to 649 different newspapers located in all 50 states, and from 1,735 ZIP codes. That included more than 1,500 letters to The New York Times, 1,400 to both USA Today and The Washington Post—not to mention 52 to The Denver Post and 21 to the Florida Times-Union.
I keep getting alerts about McCain winning this and that primary. I don’t give a hoot about McCain! But I’m not thinking no news is good news for Hillary.
