It was another collision between the right to privacy in posting on the web, and the right to transparency in figuring out the value of what has been posted.

I would like to know what others think about this debate. Should we track down and expose people who pretend to be individuals, but in fact represent paid political opposition groups, who are sending out mass messages that are blatantly false and deliberately damaging to the character/issue at hand? Is it ok to track them down and simply expose them for who they really are and steer people to more verified sources of information on the subject at hand?

In my previous life as a journalist, exposure was what we were aiming for: to show people what was really behind the Wizard's curtain by verifying facts and separating them from myths. Once they knew what was real and what was false, the theory went, people could make informed judgments based on the facts. It doesn't always turn out that way, but tools that make web postings more transparent seem positive when used in this context. Do we have to protect the noxious slime-mongers in order to also ensure that people who want to post authentic material honestly will be able to do so anonymously? Can we expose anonymity in one case, and protect it in another, without being hypocritical or damaging to civic media?

Today, I want to turn my attention to the parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show. I've long argued that one of the program's greatest functions is to educate us to reflect critically on the discourse of news and politics, especially to focus attention on how issues get "framed" by commentators, how stories get handled by networks, and in this case, how the campaigns construct representations of candidates. As we laugh at its comedy, we learn to look at the "serious news" from a different angle.

In this case, we might see the parody videos as representing the "return of the repressed." That is, these videos include the elements the parties themselves could never feature, because they reintroduce gaps or contradictions in the candidate's personas or elements which would play badly in the heartland of the country. At the same time, the parodies are deft at capturing some of the conventions ( in terms of narrative structure, rhetorical framing, and audiovisual style) of the campaign bio as a genre. And, as with the Photoshop parodies of Palin I focused on the other week, these parody videos also use a language drawn from popular culture to help us make sense of a political process that is often insular in its use of specialized language.

Obama and Mother Africa

In subtle and not so subtle ways, the official Obama video engulfed the candidate in America, excluding anything exotic in his background, stressing his mother's side of the family to the exclusion of his father's, stressing Kansas and not Kenya. Here, Africa speaks back, asserting itself again and again as the central frame for understanding Obama, "the earthly son of a goat herder from darkest Africa and an anthropologist from whitest Wichita." The video uses images and music from The Lion King to continually return us to "Mother Africa" -- and in the process, to make fun of the often mythic language the Obama campaign uses to describe his candidate. A key moment in his biography here is his trip to Kenya during which he has a "vision" of a Goat who guides him to run for the state senate. Obama's African background has been a large part of his international appeal with some suggesting that he may be uniquely situated to restore America's image in the developing world because he is seen as "one of them." Yet it is an idea that can not be spoken in an American context where Republicans often ridicule Democratic concern with international reputation, one of several meanings of their theme of "putting the country first."

We also see a parody of the idea of "predestination," which as we've seen is played more seriously in the McCain campaign biography's suggestion that he escaped death because God had bigger plans for him. Here, this idea is pushed to its logical extremes with the birth of Obama seen as a cosmic event that will set right the rift between the continents created during the Earth's formation 180 Million Years Ago. We are told, "a child is born, destined to heal that rift." Or as the title of the video suggests, in a reference to Jerry McGuire, "He Completes Us." The Obama campaign often deploys his mixed race background to bring together contradictory views of America. Obama, according to this logic, can embody the "American Promise" because he contains within his family background so many different parts of a multicultural nation. As the narrator tells us, "he was black and white, Christian and Muslim, land mammal and sea creature." The idea that an early childhood experience might foreshadow later political philosophies is ridiculed here with the suggestion that in working at Baskin-Robbins, he "united an astonishing 31 flavors of ice cream." And there are later images of blacks and whites, Arabs and Jews, even cats and dogs, embracing, as he delivers his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

And of course, running throughout the video, there's a spoof of the excesses surrounding praise for Obama's rhetorical prowese. "Every time Barrack Obama speaks, an angel has an orgasm," we are told, alongside promises that he will "unite the world" and that "change is coming." The narrator is unable to contain his excitement about Obama's speeches, lapsing into profanity which can't make it onto the air, in his enthusiasm.

John McCain: "Reformed Maverick"

The Daily Show's spoof of the McCain video works amplifies certain tendencies within the Republican framing, especially the desire to depict McCain's youth as one of rebellion against authorities (here transformed into the ongoing motif of Marlon Brando which runs through the video) and acknowledges elements that might be repressed in the official videos (such as his involvement in the Keating scandal or his shifts on many major issues.) The video reminds us that the candidate many Democrats knew and admired in the 2000 election is a very different person than the candidate who is being presented this time around, suggested by the way the video divides his life into "The Wild Years, 1936-2006" and "Abandoning Everything He's Always Stood For, 2006-Present." As the video explains, "if John McCain was going to be president, something would have to give."

The closing moments of the video illustrate something The Daily Show does very well -- raiding the news archive for footage that sheds light on recent statements by political leaders, often catching them in overt contradictions. It's a pity more mainstream news programs don't do the same because such juxtapositions can be deeply illuminating about what's going on in American politics.

There is a fair amount going on here designed to parody the hypermasculine imagery surrounding the candidate's official self-representation. His military career is framed in terms of recurring images of failure (which sometimes gets reframed as rebellion). So, we are told, "Everyone assumed this son and grandson of admirals would be a star at the Naval Academy. He showed 'em." The slow pan down the list of his graduating class, showing McCain at 894, makes fun at the way old documents and family photographs are used to authenticate ideological assertions. McCain is depicted as fighting back "against The Man" by crashing five Navy airplanes, while his fellow servicemen are described as "pussies" for keeping them in the air.

The video treads lightly around his POW experiences, certainly hard targets for humor, but then, it makes fun of the fact that these experiences insulate him from criticism, seeing this "inoculation against all future political attacks" as one of the many awards he was given in recognition of his service, alongside the Purple Heart and a "hotter, richer wife." The video also suggests his wife's wealth has also "insulated" him from the harsh realities of everyday lives. Here, the POW is seen as "decorating and redecorating the rooms of ten different imaginary houses," a reference to a recent moment when he was unable to answer a reporter's question about how many homes he owned.

Media Literacy advocates have long argued that as we study a piece of media content, we should ask our students to reflect on what it doesn't show or say, what's missing from this picture. The Daily Show parodies give us a great resource for doing just this, asking students why the official campaigns would not use such framings to represent their candidates and looking at what gets left out of the official videos.

I hope I've inspired some of you to take these materials into your classrooms. I'd love to find out what happens when and if you do so. Drop us a line and share your experiences.

Yet, Lakoff also makes the point that independent voters may be torn between conflicting understandings of the family and that all of us have within us some elements of the other model which also shapes our emotions and actions. So, we should be looking for the elements which contradict these dominant frames as offering ways that the campaigns might broaden their appeal. Last time, I discussed, for example, how the McCain video uses images of his mother, even the phrase "mother's boy," to soften his tough, military-based persona, and how he was able to use images of personal suffering to express both vulnerability and toughness. We see many more such contradictions -- or appeals across party -- when we look at the videos for the Vice Presidential candidates. Traditional logic is that the VP choice is for charging up your base while the Presidential candidates have to work across party lines. It's easy to see how this works in the two convention speeches. But I would argue that more bridge building takes place in the videos for the VP candidates than for Obama and McCain themselves.

Keep in mind as you watch that these videos are shorter than those for the top of their tickets and that they were produced under many more constraints. In both cases, the VP choices were announced just a few days before the conventions which means the teams would have had to scramble to pull these together, while the candidate's own videos were crafted over weeks and probably in planning from the moment they launched their campaigns.

One thing to look out for in these two videos is the role of the music in shaping how we respond to the still images and spoken words. In the case of the Obama video, the music borrowed heavily from Aaron Copeland to give the video a sense of national grandeur and yet to make it a "fanfare for the common man." The McCain video is much more martial in its tone, helping to establish his toughness and military background. Here, the music tracks are in effect reversed. The Biden soundtrack captures a more forceful tone, while the Palin soundtrack is softer, more wistful. Palin's music is being used to soften much tougher images and language, allowing her "feminine" side to emerge, even as we are trying to reconstruct the "strict father" model to include the prospect of a "hockey mom" who is like a "pitbull" in lipstick. Biden and the Nuturing Parent Model

The opening story in this video is used to establish Biden's toughness: "My Dad used the expression, 'You don't measure success on whether or not you get knocked down. It's how quickly you get back up.' Because everybody gets knocked down. The measure is in getting back up. That's the measure of this country. It never failed to get back up." It's all here -- the appeal to the father who is represented as tough-minded and who demands toughness in his son yet there's also here the extension of that image to represent the country as a whole. In doing so, there is just a hint of Democratic "nurturing" in the suggestion that "everybody gets knocked down" and the question of what can be done to insure that everyone gets back up. Is this a test of individual character as the story begins or is it a test of the nation's commitment to its most vulnerable members, as the ending hints?

The most compelling family images here center around Biden as a father: the story of him returning to his son's bedside following the car crash that killed his wife and daughter and "he never left it." Here, we see both a suggestion of protection against a harsh world but also the image of nurturing a child who has suffered an emotional loss. There is a strong emphasis throughout the video on the dedication that Biden feels as a father to his children -- taking the train back home from Washington every night, always taking their call -- as expressed through the testimony of his now adult son. And underlying this is the suggestion that Biden will be a dedicated father to the country. These scenes depend on a post-Feminist conception of the father not as a stern patriarch but as a mutual caregiver. And there's that warm, fuzzy shot of Biden craddling his young grandchild in his arms, which gives us a vivid picture of his gentle side.

For me, one of the most interesting rhetorical moment here is Biden's statement: "When you see the abuse of power, you've got to speak whether it is a parent slapping around a child or a president taking the nation to war that costs lives that wasn't a necessary war. That's an abuse of power." The move from domestic violence to war, from family to nation, is breathtaking here. We can read the comment as a critique of the stern father model -- suggesting that the stern father may also be an abusive father, may not adequately care for his children, may abuse his authority in demanding respect he has not earned. This passage appeals to Democratic anxieties about the patriarchal logic of the Stern Father model. But it also contains the explicit image of another kind of father who cares enough about those who are suffering to stand up to such bullies and defend the weak. Again, there's just that hint of toughness here which adds some backbone to the images of the nurturing parent. We can also see this as connected with the other image of bullying in the video -- the reference to the ways Biden's classmates tormented him because of his stutter. In this formulation, Biden is someone who has endured pain and humiliation but learned how to stand up to bullies to defend others who might become victims.

Palin and the Strict Father Model

While the "nurturing parent" paradigm is gender neutral, reflecting the reconfiguration of responsibilities within the family and the kinder, gentler conception of the patriarch that it embodies, the "strict father" model gets defined along specifically masculine lines. Lakoff takes his inspiration from James Dobson and Focus on the Family, which sees men and women as playing different and complimentary roles within the family and sees the father as the head of the household. So, the construction of Sarah Palin within the terms of this discourse is a fascinating process. Much has been made among the GOP faithful about how she has retained her "femininity" even as she has broken into the "good Ol' Boys network," and the video must somehow suggest this without undercutting the core values the Party wants to attach to their candidates.

This contrast between the models has another implication. While Biden and Obama may stress their partnership, much as husbands and wives are life partners within the nurturing parent model, the Republicans clearly want to subordinate Palin to McCain without undercutting their need to build her up as having the authority and experience to take over from him as president should he die in office. Throughout, she is depicted as a junior version of McCain, as if she was taken from his rib. The opening language of the video, which lists various roles she plays, explicitly mirrors the opening list in the McCain video. McCain, "the original maverick," (gee, I thought that was James Garner, the star of the 1950s western series, Maverick.), made an "astute choice" when he asked her to join him in Washington as his helpmate. And in the end, she's described as "Alaska's maverick" in contrast with McCain who is "America's maverick."

But, as others have noted, Palin is probably the most "rugged" Republican to be on a national ticket since Teddy Roosevelt, who also happens to be McCain's own role model, and so the video wants to wrap her up with the "frontier" myth and thus link Alaska to a broader understanding of the American west. Much of this is carried by the persistent images of the great outdoors, which also serve to reinforce the hints here that she's an environmentalist, although the kind that likes to shoot and skin moose as opposed to the "tree huggers" and "nature lovers" that Democrats are most often accused of being. Again, we see a form of environmentalism consistent with tough love rather than nurturing. Alaska, here, gains credit for being "the far corner of America," where-as if we talked about Obama's Hawaii in such terms, it would be seen as signs that he was "outside" the American "mainstream" and lacked "touch" with "heartland" values. The frontier myth is particularly strong when the video describes her family's decision to move to Alaska: "attracted to Alaska by its unlimited promise and an environment suited to outdoor adventure."

And of course, we can't overlook all of the images here of Palin interacting with service men and women, including the Alaska National Guard, given the emphasis on military backgrounds running through the McCain video. This is another way that Palin gets associated with "strength" even as we are trying to emphasis her status as an average Mom who goes to PTA meetings. But then it's worth stressing that military images appear far more often in the Biden video than in the Obama video, suggesting the ways that the Vice President is being used to increase the "toughness" of the Democratic ticket. Reason's Jesse Walker has written a very cogent critique of Lakoff's model, one which reflects upon how difficult it is to understand groups like Libertarians within the framework that it offers.

As far as I can tell, it's not currently possible for the public to determine the underlying assets of any of the mortgage security instruments that have been the subject of so much pop-culture sturm und drang. We all know that this is a big story, because the papers scream it and the numbers are enormous.

But we also know that it's a big story because it is a local story. Foreclosures are plainly visible all of us, all over the country. We all know people -- or are someone -- affected directly by failing mortgages, decreasing home prices, and the accompanying social problems like crime, blight, homelessness, downward mobility, and despair.

Large hedge funds and investment companies have gobbled up these mortgages -- pieces of paper with data on them -- again and again. They've resold them to each other, all the way into oblivion. You better believe that they know what the underlying mortgages are, but they are never published.

In July 2008, Benton J. Campbell, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, indicted Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin of the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Master Fund. This fund is a classic example of what we used to call the "Subprime Mortgage Crisis".

The indictment provides details on the scheme that the defendants allegedly perpetrated to trick people into thinking that their fund was in good shape -- to throw good money after bad. They knew the fund was collapsing, yet sought to conceal that:

CIOFFI talked about the extremely difficult month the Funds had experienced in February, stated that the Funds had averted disaster and led a vodka toast to celebrate surviving the month. Before ending the meeting, CIOFFI directed those present not to talk about the Funds' difficulties with others, including other members of the Funds' team.

And gloated at tricking people:

In an email message to another member of the portfolio management team at the end of March 2007, TANNIN expressed satisfaction at his success in convincing investors to add more capital to the Funds: "believe it or not - I've been able to convince people to add more money..."

Attorneys General love this stuff -- it makes for great headlines and is good for guttural voter outrage. So they direct their teams to mine email, wear wires, and otherwise use technology to get the goods on defendants.

What the indictment lacks-- and what I can't find anywhere-- is a simple list of the assets of the fund. What mortgages on what properties on what streets in what neighborhoods in what cities issued by what lenders for what amount of money. To be sure, this is a long list, but it is a knowable one.

Imagine what developers, journalists, activist lawyers, housing advocates, social workers, and researchers could do with such a list. The Charlotte Observer series, Sold A Nightmare, is a great example. They found disturbing patterns about particular builders, were able to pinpoint social problems that follow foreclosure, and publish a database of foreclosures in the area.

We need this data. We should have had it based on SEC rules on disclosure -- investors in these funds should be able to know what they are buying. Now that it looks like we're all going to be the buyers, there is an even more pressing imperative.

Lakoff argues that the Democrats lose elections even though they often have the facts on their side because the Republicans typically frame the debate. Consider for example the ways McCain has transformed the current energy crisis from one which might deal with the environment or economics or alternative energy to one which rises and falls on the question of off-shore drilling. Or consider the ways that the Republicans have deployed terms like "maverick" and "reformer" to distance themselves from the Bush administration. To turn this around, the Democrats need to reinvent themselves -- not by shifting their positions but by altering the frame.

As Lakoff explains, "Reframing is social change.... Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense." Much of the early excitement around Obama was that he seemed to offer the most compelling new way to "reframe" progressive politics and thus offered a way out of failed rhetoric of the past. For some, this is about style over substance or a matter of "just words," but Lakoff argues that framing is about a structure of ideas that gets evoked through particular words and phrases but has its own deep logic that shapes how and what we think.

In a simple yet suggestive analysis, Lakoff characterizes progressive and reactionary politics in terms of what he calls the Nurturing Parent and the Strict Father frames. According to the Strict Father model, Lakoff writes, "the world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. ...Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right." The strict father "dares to discipline" his family and supports a president who will discipline the nation and ultimately, the world. According to the progressive "nurturing parent" scenario, "Both parents are equally responsible for raising the children. ...The parents' job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others."

Swing voters share aspects of both world views. The goal of politics, Lakoff suggests, is to "activate your model in the people in the middle" without pushing them into the other camp.

We can see this as almost a reverse of old-style Christian doctrine in which the relation of a husband to his wife or a father to his child is supposed to mirror the relations of God to man. In this case, the family becomes a microcosm through which we can understand the relationship of the president to the nation and the world.

This is consistent with an argument that I put forth in the introduction to The Children's Culture Reader that the Republicans and the Democrats both use the figure of the child as a rhetorical device in talking about their visions for the future of the country, but they understand the family in very different terms. In an analysis of the 1996 GOP and Democratic national conventions, I contrasted Hillary Clinton's deployment of the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child" with oft-cited Republican images of the family as a "fort" defending its members against a hostile world.

As a teacher, I've found that one of the best ways to introduce this important argument to my classes has been to engage in a critical comparison between the official campaign biography videos, shown at the national conventions, and intended to link the candidate's personal narrative with the larger themes of the campaign. Here, we can see very explicit connections between the ways that the two parties understand the family and the nation. These videos are easy to access on the web and bring into your classrooms.

Over my next three posts, I will look more closely at first the videos for the two Presidential candidates, then the bios for the two Vice Presidential candidates, and finally parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show. I am hoping that this will provide inspiration for educators who might want a way to talk about the campaigns, the differences between the parties, and the role of media in the process.

First, a few general points. Students often react to these videos when they first see them as if they were documentaries, straight forward presentations of the facts of the candidates' lives. If Obama and McCain tell very different stories, it is because they led very different lives. And this is of course partially true. The videos mobilize elements from the candidate's biographies to construct narratives about them which are designed to introduce them to the American people. For many votes, these videos and the acceptance speeches are the first time they are paying attention to these candidates.

Yet, keep in mind the role selectivity plays here -- we can't tell everything about their lives in a short video, so get students to think about what they decide to include and what they leave out of these videos. There's also the question of framing -- what gets said by the candidate, by the people in his or her family, by others, and by the narrator -- which helps us to understand this person in specific ways. And then there's the matter of technique -- what kinds of images do we see, what role does the music play in setting the tone for these stories.

I've found that these videos work best in a classroom setting where I show them side by side so that the students compare the differences in their approach. On one level, there's a well established genre here -- a general framing, followed by childhood experiences, early career, courtship and marriage, education, national service, early political life, fatherhood and family, and launch of the campaign. These similarities make it easy to see the differences in framing at work. If you are pushed for time, as I was in class the other day, you are better off showing the first 2-3 minutes of each, and then getting the discussion started, than showing one through all the way. It is through the comparison that we really understand how these videos deploy melodramatic devices and images of the family to shift how we think about the candidate's relationship to the nation.

Obama and the Nurturing Parent Frame

From start to finish, the Obama video is focused on constructing the ideal image of the nurturing parent who will insure the well being of all Americans. The very opening lines of the video already evoke the image of childhood: "It is a promise we make to our children that each of us can make what we want from our lives" and the climax of the video comes when we return to that opening statement and build upon it: "It was a promise his mother made to him and that he intended to keep." Think about the difference between talking about the "American promise" and the "American dream," and you know a great deal about the ideological differences between the two parties.

The idea of "empathy" is a central cornerstone of the family as depicted in this video. It emerges most powerfully in the story about Obama's mother urging him to "imagine standing in that person's shoes. How would that make you feel." and again, by the end of the video, this concept of empathy becomes a cornerstone of Obama's relationship to the nation, as he describes how he remembers his mother as he travels "from town to town." Empathy runs through the list of values Obama tells us that he and Michelle want to pass down to their children: "hard work, honesty, self-reliance, respect for other people, a sense of empathy, kindness, faith." And we can see this respect for nurturing and empathy when he talks about the death of his mother, who was "the beating heart" of their family. Indeed, moments when candidates talk about personal losses of family members and loved ones are often potent appeals to the viewer's own empathy, since many of us feel our common humanity most powerfully through our shared experience of mortality.

And this logic of empathy emerges through the suggestion that Obama knows first hand the suffering and anxieties felt by average Americans: "I know what it's like not to have a father in the house, to have a mother who's trying to raise kids, work, and get her college education at the same time. I know what it's like to watch grandparent's age, worrying about whether their fixed income is going to be able to cover the bills."

We can see this last comment as part of a larger strategy in the video to depict Obama's personal narrative as the "story" of America and his "search for self" as a quest to better understand the nation that gave him birth. As the narrator explains, "By discovering his own story, he would come to know what is remarkable about his country." And this is an outgrowth of the first thing we are told about his mother, that she knew her son was an American "and he needs to understand what that means."

This video works hard to combat images of Obama's background as exotic, as outside the mainstream. There is no reference here to Hawaii and only an implicit nod to the fact that he spent part of his life overseas, even though this last detail has been central to the candidate's appeal internationally. The focus is on the most "heartland" aspects of his family background -- a strong focus on his grandparents who come from Kansas, and their experience of the Depression and World War II. Obama got into trouble for suggesting that some people in rural Pennsylvania were "bitter," so the video is careful to say that his grandparents were not "complainers." When it comes time to capture his sense of pride in his country, he tells a story about sitting on his grandfather's shoulders and waiving a flag at the return of the astronauts.

The representation here of his marriage might be summed up with the old feminist slogan, "the personal is the political." Michelle describes the moment she fell in love with Barrack: watching him deliver a speech in the basement of a community center in which he spells out "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be." This story collapses Obama's hopes for his family and his hopes for his country in a sublime moment of utopian possibilities. Michelle emerges as the ideal arbiter of his political integrity because she can testify that he lives these values through his personal lives.

And the final statement of the "nurturing parent" model comes when Obama tells us, "One person's struggle is all of our struggles." The government becomes a mutual support system that looks after its weakest members in a world which is often unjust. The president's job is to insure that all of his children gets what they need and deserve and that the "American promise" gets fulfilled and transfered to the next generation.

McCain and the Strict Father Model

If the Obama video sets up issues of nurturing and empathy from its first images, suggested by the long panning shots across American faces and a voiceover about the "American Promise," the McCain video opens with us staring directly into the face of the candidate as a young naval officer, trying to read his character and understand the relationship of this national service to the "mission" ahead. The opening narration starts with descriptions of him as "a warrior, a soldier, a naval aviator, a Pow," before pulling us down to the family -- "a father, a son, a husband", then into his political career. And then we get that surprising moment when he is called "a mother's boy," one suggestion of softness amid a series of hypermasculine sounds, images, and terms. My students suggested that the reference to the mother helps him deal with issues of age and mortality, yet it also seems part of a strategy to manage the negative associations which many independents and Democrats may feel towards the repeated references to his toughness throughout the video.

Strength of character and conviction, coupled with physical toughness as proven through war, are the central virtues ascribed to McCain by the video and they are introduced here once again through the narrative of his family. As suggested by the gender specificity of the "Strict father" construction, the family here, except for the references to the mother, is represented almost entirely through patriarchal bloodlines -- again a contrast to the absent father and strong mother image in the Obama video. We learn about his grandfather who died the day he returned from World War II; we learn about his father who ordered the carpet bombing of a country where his son was held captive, even as he waited at the border hoping for his return. When we see him with his son in the opening series of shots, he is standing alone with his offspring on the side of a mountain. Fatherhood is an extension of manhood and it gets expressed through discipline and competition more than through images of cuddling and craddling.

The critical moments here, of course, deal with his Vietnam war experience which require a recognition of vulnerability and weakness even as the larger narrative centers around his toughness and will power. Consider this key description: "Critically injured, his wounds never properly addressed, for the next five and a half years, John was tortured and dragged from one filthy prison to another, violently ill, often in solitary confinement, he survived through the faith he learned from his father and grandfather, the faith that there was more to life than self."

So, again, we see the passing down of civic virtue through male bloodlines as a central motif in this video. There's no question that the video constructs these experiences as a form of martyrdom out of which a national leader emerged: "The constant torture and isolation could have produced a bitter, broken man. Instead he came back to America with a smile -- with joy and optimism. He chose to spend his life serving the country he loved." or consider the phrase, "he chose to spend four more years in Hell." Or the ways the video depicts his role in the normalization of relations with Vietnam -- "Five and a half years in their hell and he chose to go back because it was healing for America. That's country first." Note this is one of the few places where metaphors of "caring" or "healing" surface in the video and it is specifically in relation to the pain of wartime. A more complex metaphor emerges as Fred Thompson reads aloud a passage from McCain's autobiography about "living in a box" and ends with "when you've lived in a box, your life is about keeping others from having to endure that box."

This toughness and individualism carries over into the discussions of national policy. McCain doesn't believe that the country should care for each of its members but rather he has "a faith in the American people's ability to chart their own course." He is "committed to protect the American people but a ferocious opponent of pork barrel spending and would do most anything to keep taxes low and keep our money in our pockets." What is implied by that contrast between "protecting" the public and "pork barrel spending" and "higher taxes"? There is a clear sense that as a stern father he will give us what we really need but protect us from our own baser urges and desires.

While the Obama video distributed its points across a range of different voices, including a large number of women, the McCain video tends to rely on a voice of God narrator who speaks the unquestioned truth about this man and on comments from McCain himself. All of this creates a more authoritarian/authoritative structure where truth comes from above, rather than emerging from listening to diverse voices, and reflects this notion of stern responsibility rather than nurturing.

This centralized discourse is consistent with the videos focus on experience and its tendency to read McCain as "superior" to others -- "no one cherishes the American dream more," for example, but also no candidate has had his experiences in public service. There is an underlying suggestion here of predestination -- "McCain's life was somehow sparred -- perhaps he had more to do." In this case, the hint is that he is fulfilling God's plan for him and for the country. This issue of predestination resurfaces near the end when the video repurposes some of the core themes of the Obama campaign, including some that McCain has criticized and turns them around, "What a life, what a faith, what a family! What good fortune that America will chose this leader at precisely this time. The stars are aligned. Change will come. But change must be safety, prosperity, optimism, and peace. The change will come from strength -- from a man who found his strength in a tiny dank cell thousands of miles from home."

There's so much more that we could say about both of these videos and that's the point. They are great resources for teaching young people to reflect critically on the ways the campaigns are being "framed." Next time, I will look more closely at the Vice Presidential videos.

From celebrity-studded parties, to the tear gassing of protesters, to lots and lots of young voters, mobile reporting using new technologies was instrumental to our coverage. During the conventions, I was hoping that our audience would come to chooseorlose.com and feel a sense of excitement from the ground through dynamic, up-to-the minute coverage. I think that between the Twitter feed, live mobile-to-web Flixwagon reports and blogs that took over our site during the conventions, we accomplished that.

RNC Street Teamers with their Twitter feed

I don't think that any of the aforementioned reporting methods would have stood particularly well on its own. None of them provide a lot of depth, but taken as a package, the audience can get a pretty well-rounded picture of what's going on and become directly engaged in following a story as it unfolds, rather than just having it all tied up with a pretty bow, after the fact. During the conventions, our "tweets" sent from reporters' mobile phones provided teasers to what they would be covering ("Just interviewed a 19 year-old from Chicago who won't be voting for the Illinois Senator this year") or just immediate observations from the ground ("Hillary appears at roll call and moves to skip procedure and nominate Obama! Place going wild.") The live, mobile-to-web video coverage fleshed these out by providing the sounds and sights of the conventions, and then round-up blog entries like this one contextualized it all.

One of the biggest benefits of using these on-the-fly technologies is that it allows for a small, nimble crew to cover a lot of ground and get their work out to an audience quickly, without being burdened by cumbersome equipment or even having to depend on a feed truck. It works really well in situations like the conventions where a lot is happening at once. At each event, it seemed that 90% of the action was actually going on outside the convention center buildings, and the five Street Teamers in Denver and five in St. Paul managed to capture a lot of that. They got on-the-fly interviews with celebs from John Legend to Jessica Alba, politicos from Bill Richardson to Bob Dole to Rosa Clemente, major news personalities such as Fox's Shep Smith, and of course lots of young delegates, volunteers and protesters. Even their coverage from inside the convention halls was different from the mainstream reports, in that it provided a peer-to-peer, unscripted glimpse of the conventions up-close.

Street Teamer Anthony of Florida Gets Tear-Gassed, Live from the RNC

The difference between our coverage and that of the mainstream networks is striking not just because of the technology, but also because of what we captured. While the major news networks of the world were safe in their on-site studios, our team was literally on the streets getting the under-reported stories. This was particularly true at RNC, where the thousands of protesters and, more importantly, heavy-handed police reactions, were not well-documented by other media outlets. In one particularly dramatic live-to-web clip, which you can see above, we witnessed one of our reporters going through the physical reaction to being tear-gassed while covering a protest.

The most dramatic example of how our mobile coverage played out was on the final night of the Republican National Convention. While thousands were preparing to cheer McCain's speech inside the convention center, our Wisconsin reporter, Charlie, was hot on the trail of an anti-war protest gearing up outside. His "tweets" began...

• Anti war protest @ capital starts with 2 arrests 02:17 PM September 04, 2008
• **The whole world is watching, protesters chant **@ police 04:52 PM September 04, 2008
• Protest on the move 05:40 PM September 04, 2008
• March goes 2 Marion and University 06:01 PM September 04, 2008
  

At the same time, we were watching Charlie's Flixwagon reports, wherein protesters, bystanders, and reporters alike, were being rounded up on a bridge. With smoke bombs visible in the background, Charlie told our audience, "We were just told that this is an unlawful assembly, and we must move Southbound or be subject to arrest," and then...

Nothing.

An hour or so went by with no more Twitter or video reports, and we realized that Charlie had probably been arrested. After many calls to local jails, our suspicion was confirmed around 12 AM. Despite his media credentials, Charlie was carted off to prison and separated from his equipment. If it had not been for the pause in his live, mobile, reporting, we would never have even known to ask. Charlie's arrest, along with hundreds of others, occurred right during McCain's speech, when the rest of the worlds' lenses were focused on the presidential nominee.

Charlie was released from jail around 6 AM...but his backpack full of gear was still inside. The police needed to hang on to the video camera, tapes and other equipment, "for security purposes." As I type, his equipment is still being held in St. Paul and our attorneys are working on getting it released. If the police had it their way, his footage from the protest would still have not seen the light, and by the time it came out, it would be "yesterday's news." Fortunately for us and our audience, Charlie was reporting live from his cell phone, and we all witnessed another side of what was happening in St. Paul while John McCain was accepting the presidential nomination.

Rosen and others are calling for journalists of all stripes (professionals, amateurs, citizens, bloggers, etc.) to use a #spinewatch tag on Twitter and elsewhere to call attention to whether or not the professional press covering the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election is standing up to stonewalling candidates or sitting back and repeating their talking points.

In an IM interview today, Jay said:

"The premise behind spinewatch is more this: It's hard for me to see how you can have a more legitimate or consensus practice in campaign journalism than fact-checking the empirical claims candidates make -- in ads, speeches, interviews -- as they compete for votes. In other words, if the press cannot at least do that, what is it good for?"

The full IM transcript after the jump...

Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion.

This is timely and important work. I've spoken with numerous community leaders in Silicon Valley in recent months who are growing more anxious about what will happen to the quality of civic life if the coverage of local news continues to diminish.

Amy Gahran (who also blogs here at Idea Lab) took up this subject at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits blog where she asked of the commission's work: "How important is local, really?":

I suspect that clinging reflexively to "local" as the paramount criteria for "relevant" reflects a newspaper perspective that was never a good fit for most people, and that never really served most people's information needs well.

But, in fact, that's exactly the issue here: Even in Silicon Valley, there are growing numbers of city councils and counties that are no longer covered. There are school districts barely covered. And local elections are now barely covered with any depth. The result is a growing anxiety that less information about local issues will lead to less civic engagement. Despite the explosion of virtual networks, we still lives our lives in the real, physical world. And there are issues and information that I would argue are vital and distinct as they relate to your personal geography.

Sounds grim, right? Except there's also an opportunity to create local information networks that could be far better than the ones that are ebbing. Even at their apex, newspapers still only covered a sliver of the news and information that hit closest to home for most local communities.

To tackle this vast subject, the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute announced earlier this year the creation of this 15-member commission. The commission is being co-chaired by Marissa Mayer, a vice president at Google, and Theodore Olsen, the former solicitor general of the United States, and it includes other such notable figures as Michael Powell, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission.

The commission is asking three big questions:

*What are the information needs of communities in our American democracy?
*What are the current trends affecting how community information needs are met?
*What changes will ensure that community information needs will be better met in the future?

A version of my remarks are posted here.

But I wanted to highlight a few issues that were discussed that struck me:

*Trust. I wrote about this issue in a column last week for the Mercury News. The question fundamentally is how does a community filter the explosion of information and evaluate which sources are reliable? This sparked one of the more interesting conversations on Monday. It raised a second question about whether there needs to be some new kind of intermediary, or whether we can count on the wisdom of crowds to help establish reputation and trust and responsibility.

*Community information is a broader conversation than just journalism. When people get together to discuss what comes next after newspapers, there tends to be a lot of journalists in the room, and so a lot of the conversation revolves around journalism. Certainly, that's a critical component. But when I think about community information, I think of things like a visit my family made on our way to Yosemite recently. We stopped in a Target in a small town in the Central Valley and at the front of the store were two computer kiosks. They were there because apparently you have to apply for jobs online at Target. But in this digital era, how are folks in that area able to find out about jobs, let alone apply, if they're not digitally savvy?

*Digital literacy. However things evolve, it seems clear that citizens will need a higher degree of digital literacy to be informed consumers or active participants as they choose. I know the Knight Foundation is going through some soul searching about its mission in this changing landscape. But while I don't think we can expect foundations to fund the journalism we need forever, the area of digital literacy seems like a great place for foundations and educational institutions to focus their efforts.

I thought back on my arguments there this past week as I've begun to search out some of the images being generated in response to John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Given the intense flood of news coverage around this decision, the ways that it has shaken up the terms of the campaign, and the ways that it challenges gender assumptions surrounding the Republican leadership, it is no surprise that it has provoked a range of response. And I thought it might be interesting to dissect some of these images here.

Some of the first images that circulated around the Palin appointment were, in effect, frauds. They sought to tap into the media feeding frenzy and the blogosphere's search for any incriminating evidence. Some of these images were probably already in circulation in Alaska before the announcement, while others may have emerged quickly as the nation started to learn who this woman is. Here are two examples. Both suggest the ways that Palin doesn't fit our expectations about what a female politician looks like. For the first time, we have a vice presidential candidate who is young, feminine, and well as she is one of the first to acknowledge, "hot." She was after all a runner up for the Miss Alaska competition and this couldn't be further removed from our current Vice President or for that matter, the tough matronly style adopted by America's most successful female politicians. Camile Paglia celebrates Palin in a recent Salon article: "In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment." Needless to say, Palin's appearance and persona provokes strong reactions, ones which struggle to separate anxieties that she may be a Stepford Wife or a Barbie from a more generalized dismissal of attractive women. This first image plays on the fact that Palin did pose for photographs for Vogue by constructing a mock cover of the magazine.

This second plays with the contradiction between the sexy mom] and the rough and tumble Alaskan. She's a "babe," in this case, a Bikini-clad "Babe," who also knows how to shoot and skin her own meat. This image was deemed sufficiently plausible that it needed to be discredited at the Urban Legends site.

Those of you who watched the televised convention no doubt caught the disconcerting images of 70 something male delegates bearing buttons bragging about how "hot" Governor Palin is. Given the actual buttons circulated at the convention, this mock button is not as far fetched as it might seem, though now we are moving into the space of political humor rather than anything that was meant to deceive the viewer.

This next one juxtaposes erotic images of Palin with the very real anxieties about mortality raised by McCain's age. One of the most powerful arguments against the Palin appointment has been the concerns about what would happen if McCain were to die in office. And before he announced her pick, pundits had said that he needed to choose someone who would reassure voters that the VP would be prepared to move into the top office and stabilize the country.

This Photoshop collage also calls attention to the vast age difference between the 70-something McCain and his 40-something running mate -- in this case, by reading the pairing in relation to the Anna Nicole Smith case. This is a classic example of how grassroots political humor maps politics onto popular culture, thus allowing us to mobilize our expertise as fans or simply readers of People magazine to make sense of the complexities of American politics.

Several images in circulation read Palin as a superhero. Indeed, I was struck when I first saw her that she had adopted many of the stylistic choices of female superheroes in their alterego disguises -- her hair up in a bun, big librarian glasses. These "serious" trappings no more mask the beauty queen underneath than Clark Kent's glasses hide Superman and in the real world, they can come across as inauthentic. You add that with the stories of her braving the elements and slaughtering Alaskian wildlife and you can imagine the Amazon underneath the librarian disguise. I have been imagining that moment which would be inevitable if this were a movie where she takes off her glasses, lets out her hair, and gives a sultry look to the American voters.

This next image pushes the conception of Palin as superhero in an entirely different direction -- this time, she's Batgirl. Here, she fits into an ongoing series of popular images which depict McCain as Bush's "sidekick," one of the ways that the idea that McCain represents a continuation of the Bush administration, a constant refrain at the Democratic convention, is entering the popular imagination. So, she's now the "sidekick" of a "sidekick," who will likewise continue the Bush Administration's policies for "four more years."

Given the ways that Palin's announcement has been intertwined with debates about teen pregnancy, it is no surprise that the poster for Juno has become a basic resource for people wanting to comment on these issues. Many feminists have already critiqued the film for making teen pregnancy and adoption seem like the only viable option for its protagonists. And of course, it doesn't hurt that Juneau is one of the larger cities in Palin's home state.

I couldn't resist throwing in two additional examples surrounding the McCain campaign. This first links McCain himself to Doctor Strangelove as a way of conveying the fear that the candidate may be a war-mongerer.

The second playfully reworks an Obama poster, one of the most vivid visual icons of the campaign to date, and in the process, sets up the contrast between Obama's politics of "Hope" and McCain's politics of "Nope."

We can expect to see many more such images produced and circulated as the campaigns intensify even more over the coming two months.

Most of these examples are taken from the Political Humor site which regular collects such Photoshop images. You can find many more examples here.

I plan to open the course with reflections on the current presidential campaign season, the role of both old and new media, and signs of increased voter registration and activity by young Americans. To set the stage, I am having my students read from several recent news stories on the campaign, including: David von Drehle, "The Year of the Youth Vote", Time , Jan. 31 2008. David Talbot, "How Obama Really Did It", Technology Review, September/October 2008, Marc Ambinder, "HisSpace", The Atlantic, June 2008.

In the first class session, we will be looking at the images constructed around the two candidates through their advertising, websites, and official biography videos. The best online resource for these materials is realclearpolitics, a site which aggregates recent media coverage of the campaigns, including collecting current political advertising. I plan to discuss the roles which YouTube played early in the campaign season, a topic which I discuss in a new "afterward" to the recently released paperback edition of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. And I plan to explore the ways that the McCain campaign is taking aim at Obama's blurring of the lines between popular culture and politics, a topic I addressed in a recent post on my blog. We also will be placing these materials in a larger historical context by looking at earlier forms of political advertising. You can find such materials through the Living Room Candidate, an archive created by the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY, and through Project Look Sharp's curricular materials on studying presidential campaigns.

From here, the course will progress across a range of related topics including:

• New Media Literacies
• Civic Engagement
• Youth as Cybercitizens
• Digital Ethics
• Is There a Digital Generation?
• Children's Fiction and the Fiction of Childhood
• Expression and Participation
• Games and Virtual Worlds
• Collective Intelligence and Social Networks
• Identity and Community
• The Digital Divide and the Participation Gap

The only full book we are reading is Cory Doctorow's recent young adult novel, Little Brother, which deals with the politics of cyberactivism and homeland security. Check out my blog post on this important novel.

We will also be reading extensively from the recently published Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, written by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser from Harvard's Berkman Center.

We will also be drawing extensively from the new books, recently released by the MIT Press and the MacArthur Foundation, as part of their Digital Media and Learning Series -- Civic Life Online;Digital Media, Youth and Credability; Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected; The Ecology of Games; Learning Race and Ethnicity; Youth, Identity and Digital Media. All of these books are available online for free access and they include work by many of the most important contemporary thinkers on youth and media literacy.

I also anticipate working with the report out from an extensive ethnographic study of young people's online lives being conducted by Mimi Ito, Barrie Thorne, Michael Carter, and an army of graduate students from USC and Berkley; this document will be released later this term, but you can read about the research.

For a counter perspective on many of these issues, my students will also be reading from Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30).

And I will be having students look at parts of Ben Rigby's Mobilizing Generation 2.0. I recently interviewed Rigby for my blog.

Throughout the course, we will be looking at a range of recent white papers which offer cutting edge perspectives on these issues, including:

• Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century
• Twenty First Century Skills
• The Civic Mission of Schools
• Cynthia Gibson, Citizens at the Center: A New Approach to Civic Engagement
• Aspen Institute, Civic Engagement on the Move: How Mobile Media Is Serving the Public Good
• Carrie James with Katie Davis, Andrea Flores, James M. Francis, Lindsey Pettingill, Margaret Rundle and Howard Gardner, Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media

And we will be eagerly awaiting the report soon to be issued by the Pew Center on the Internet & American Life which deals with the ways young people's experiences as gamers might impact their lives as citizens.

Along the way, we will be exploring two significant PBS documentaries, both of which can now be accessed online -- Growing Up Online and By the People: Citizenship in the 21st Century.

The Center will also be hosting two public events through the MIT Communications Forum this fall focused around the Presidential Campaign and the role of media. You can find out more information about these events and hear podcast versions of previous Forum events here.

I hope to offer some more reports on the class and how it is informing our work at the Center for Future Civic Media in the weeks ahead. But I'm hoping the above may introduce you to some materials you might not know about otherwise.

In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul "cool." "He's a good guy," she added. "He's so independent. He's independent of the party machine. I'm like, 'Right on, so am I.' "

She also spoke about feeling allegiance with former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. "He said all the right things about resource development in Alaska," she said. "I didn't have an opportunity to speak to all the candidates, but again, it's not my job to speak to all the candidates and tell Americans who to vote for. That's Americans' jobs, to figure out what candidates are standing for. That's the voters' jobs."

She went on to say that she hoped the needs of her state would be addressed in Washington. "I talk about involvement by Americans having a say in where the nation is going to go," she said. "This is an exciting day. And for Alaska, you know, I hope we register on somebody's radar screen."

She also spoke about Alaska's natural resources, and urged the next president to look to her state for relief from the country's reliance on foreign oil. "We have so much oil we are just sitting on," she said. "We would be less reliant on foreign sources of energy [if we utilized that] -- we need to have the ability to tap into it and produce for rest of the United States."

To hear more of what Palin had to say check out the video

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A Gustav Information Center on the social networking site Ning:

A government Gustav Twitter feed

A Gustav Wiki with centralized information:

And a whole slew of live video feeds and news broadcasts on LiveNewsCameras.com

Please help spread the word to those who can benefit from the resources now in place, many put together by volunteers.

State political reporters salivated -- until they heard how DA David Soares was issuing the material. Instead of putting it on-line, the county clerk released a CD and charged $90 for it. "I'm just starting to go through it, and it's an absolute mess," complained the LoHud.com blog. "Every page is its own PDF file and not even scrollable or searchable."

Soares went somewhat further than most officials but his release that is not a release is all too common. Public officials boast of putting material on-line and then do so in ways that stymie average citizens and even Web journalists trying to review data that should be a matter of public record. Even when material is available, it is, like the Albany documents, often difficult to search and manipulate in a way that provides any kind of meaningful information.

Those of us trying to find information about New York City government encounter this again and again -- despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg's not so deserved reputation for transparency. In a recent article for Gotham Gazette, Kristofer Ri­os and Joshua Breitbart describe how difficult it can be to get information about city government -- despite a path-breaking city law requiring that city documents be posted to the official Web site promptly. "With no method for enforcement, compliance has been spotty," the authors write. Most information that is available, they say, is in the form of a PDF, "which takes information and turns it into a two-dimensional document that cannot be manipulated or transformed into other kinds of data."

And those PDFs can be difficult to find. Last fall, to much fanfare, the city Department of Education graded every school in the city. It boasted all the results would be on-line -- and they are. But finding them requires a familiarity with educational jargon, tireless fingers and a second sense about the workings of the minds of Bloomberg's educrats. Comparing schools, which is what many parents seeking a school for their kid want to do, requires repeated downloads.

And, as EveryBlock has found, some information is not available at all. The service wants to provide New Yorkers with detailed timely and local information about crime in their neighborhoods. Ri­os and Breitbart report, "In Chicago ..., residents wanting to know what crimes have occurred in their area simply type in their address or neighborhood and receive a list of reported offenses. Clicking on the crime brings more information, including a locator map. This comes directly from the police department's records. By contrast, all the New York EveryBlock site offers is a weekly compendium of crimes by precinct, with no details on the reports and no indication of where in the precinct the alleged offense occurred."

This is not for lack of trying on EveryBlock's part. But rather, Ri­os and Breitbart say, the NYPD's weekly Comp Stat report does little more than break citywide data into seven broad categories and is only available to the public as a PDF: "The department provides the information by precinct, but city residents cannot search for crime statistics by their ZIP code, neighborhood or even borough." As a final touch, the link for "Department Statistics" on the police department site has been down for weeks.

Knowledge is power and politicians or adept ones anyway (and Bloomberg is nothing if not adept) are unlikely to provide unvarnished meaningful information voluntarily. Should civic media, particularly on-line media, play a role in trying to force government's hand? And, if so, how can that be accomplished?

Since we're dealing with a fairly niche topic mainly involving local government in a small city, we were relying on some initiative from people involved in what the city is doing with the carbon tax money. The kind of engagement we envisioned was people speaking up, having a public conversation. But when it came down to it, most of the people "in the know" about Boulder's carbon tax weren't actually comfortable with taking that step.

Part of the problem is that the people most knowledgeable about this issue, while willing to have face-to-face private or group conversations about the matter, were reluctant to share their thoughts online in a persistent, findable way. That's because most of them have various overlapping commitments and concerns (business, political, social, etc.) that cause them concern when they can't directly control who hears which part of what they have to say. So far, we haven't found a good way to get around that barrier.

While dealing with this frustrating challenge, another intriguing issue arose: Most of these people expressed comfort with being interviewed, even though they are reluctant to speak up directly. We were puzzled by this.

For a long time Adam Glenn and I resisted doing interviews. After all, the point of our project was to engage the community in conversation. Resorting to interviews felt too much like traditional journalism. But now, as our project is nearing its end and we haven't yet gotten much traction in this community, we've realized that our last option is to mediate the discussion in a conventional journalistic way.

So now we're going to try yielding to that preference, by doing video interviews. We're starting to work with three people from the University of Colorado journalism school to interview some of the key people on this issue. We're just ramping up on that phase of the project, and we'll see how it goes.

Why video? We think that video will provide the most direct experience of how people express themselves, and therefore be least like traditional journalism and at least somewhat approximate a conversation.

The psychology and politics of speaking up of your own volition v. getting interviewed is pretty interesting, too.

When you are chosen to be interviewed, it can appear to enhance your importance: Someone thought you were interesting or important enough to ask.

In this audio clip from a recent IT Conversations podcast, Jon Udell interviews Dan Bricklin, president of Software Garden, on audio production. About 40 minutes into it, their conversation turned to how people perceive being sought for an interview or photo as a sign of respect:

In contrast, simply speaking up on your own initiative can appear pushy, vain, or desperate. Consider how, in the book world, self-published books are still commonly stigmatized as "vanity press," regardless of quality. That's changing slowly for some publishing markets and genres, but that stigma is hard to fight in all kinds of media.

Furthermore, being chosen to be interviewed can appear to mitigate your personal responsibility for what you say. Answering a question about a touchy subject can be far more politically palatable than choosing to raise the subject of your own volition.

Finally, many people are still uncomfortable with the idea of circumventing the social authority of mainstream news organizations. This is especially true of government officials and public employees, but it's also true of scientists, businesspeople, and others who rely heavily on authority for making decisions, statements, and deals.

Authority sometimes gets a bad rap in American society. It's very human and natural to seek authority, in order to control your personal cognitive burden (decisions, research, etc.), and to feel the security of belonging to a community bound by shared values. If we could never defer to authority, figuring out what to believe and do would be and endless daily chore, fraught with personal responsibility and risk at every turn. It's simply too much work to make up your own mind about everything in today's world.

The human social tendency to seek authority also discourages many people from speaking up directly via nontraditional or non-mainstream media -- especially on topics that involve their work or professional life. Doing so feels a little bit like you're going to sit at the "geek" table in the high school lunchroom. What will people think if you start hanging out with that crowd? Could it damage your own perceived status?

Lesson learned: For community projects that depend on participation from experienced professionals discussing their work and opinions, starting an open public conversation is probably going to be very, very, hard.

In particular, posing public questions to these people questions and hoping they will respond publicly in kind is likely to fail, because they may feel cornered and defensive.

For most professionals, government officials, and public employees, it may be better to work with their ingrained preference for the hierarchy of media: Contacting them for a private interview, asking them questions, and then presenting an edited version of the answers. Later, some of them may be willing to speak up more. But almost all of them probably will be strongly averse to starting by speaking up themselves.

At least, that's been our experience so far. Stay tuned to see how the video interviews go.]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2008/08/resorting-to-interviews-when-c.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/08/resorting-to-interviews-when-c.html Audio/VisualGovernment & PoliticsParticipationPhilosophy communityconversationgovernmentinterviewspoliticsvideo Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:38:49 -0500 David Sasaki M.D. Leaves Profession to Blog

Last week one of the most emailed stories on the New York Times website was about a medical doctor who traded in his profession for a more lucrative one: blogging. No, Arnold Kim M.D. does not blog about kidney diagnosis, his specialty, but rather, rumors about future Apple products. His blog, MacRumors.com is listed as the second most valuable blog ($85 million) on the internet right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, according to 24/7 Wall St., a financial news blog.

But what if Arnold Kim M.D. did decide to blog about medical tablets rather than speculation of an Apple tablet? What rules and ethics would govern Kim's blogging? Should he offer medical advice on his blog? Is it ethical to describe the conditions of actual patients? Would it be better that he blog anonymously or that he use his real name? Should he be forthright about the problems facing his profession and the hospital where he works?

Those same difficult questions were asked by Tara Lagu, Elinore Kaufman, David Asch, and Katrina Armstrong in "Content of Weblogs Written by Health Professionals," an academic paper funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine last week. The cost of the article if published from JGIM is $32, however, the entire article has been made available on the web by Pharmalot. The objective of the study, in its own words, is to "examine the scope and content of medical blogs and approximate how often blog authors commented about patients, violated patient privacy, or displayed a lack of professionalism."

The authors of the study take for granted that the influence of medical blogs will continue to grow:

Medical blogs are now part of the literature and media of medicine. These media include professional and scientific publication and presentation, medical stories and medical dramatizations in books, movies, theater, radio, and on television. Although medical blogs are a new addition to this list, the rapid increase in the use of the Internet suggests that their importance will
grow.

But they are also cautious about the unique unmediated nature of the medium:

Other forms of medical communication, such as presentations at medical conferences or articles in the lay press, adhere to specific standards of content and decorum. In contrast, medical blogs are public documents written in a diary style typically used for private thoughts. The authors of some medical blogs censor their thoughts and comments less than we expect they would in traditional public settings.

The Flea Malpractice Controversy

Without explicitly saying so, the study was seemingly inspired by the controversial case of 'Flea', a pseudonymous blogging doctor who revealed the details of a patient's death after a malpractice case was brought against him. Incredibly, 'Flea', now publicly known as Robert P. Lindeman, blogged his way to a costly out-of-court settlement after publishing posts which ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the lawyer, and accused members of the jury of dozing. It was, according to the Boston Globe's Jonathan Saltzman, "a Perry Mason moment updated for the Internet age."

Lindeman's blogging as a court defendant, much like his blogging as a pediatrician, offered insight into malpractice cases which is not widely known among the general public. According to the Boston Globe article:

In April, before the trial began, [Lindeman] wrote about meeting with an expert on juries who advised him how to act when he was cross- examined. Flea was instructed to angle his chair slightly toward the jury, keep his hands folded in his lap, and face the jury when answering questions, slowly. "Answers should be kept to no more than three sentences," he wrote.

The consultant told him juries in medical malpractice cases base verdicts almost entirely on their view of a doctor's character.

"We've said it before, and we'll say it again: If the basis of this case is that Flea is an arrogant, uncaring jerk who maliciously neglected a patient, resulting in his death, the plaintiff will not win, period," Flea wrote.

Held to Higher Standards

In total, the authors of Content of Weblogs Written by Health Professionals identified 271 medical blogs with the help of Google and three medical blog aggregators: Medlogs, Yahoo Health and Medicine Blogs and The Medical Blog Network. In each of the 271 blogs, they examined five posts from throughout 2006, but do not explain how those five posts were selected. (I certainly wouldn't want my own blog portrayed in an academic study based on just five blog posts.)

They found that over half of the bloggers provided sufficient information to reveal their identities. Individual patients were described in over 40% of the studied blogs and were portrayed positively in 16% of blogs and negatively in nearly 18%. "Of blogs that described interactions with individual patients, 45 (16.6%) included sufficient information for patients to identify their doctors or themselves. Three blogs showed recognizable photographic images of patients. Healthcare products were promoted, either by images or descriptions, in 31 (11.4%) blogs."

The authors of the study don't judge the torrent of new medical blogs to be either good or bad. Rather, they acknowledge that blogs "allow physicians and nurses to share their narratives, knowledge and
experience with the healthcare world" and "accurately portray the challenges facing our professions." However, they caution that "health professionals who share private thoughts in public settings risk revealing confidential patient information or otherwise reflecting poorly on the profession" and recommend that healthcare professionals who blog hold themselves to higher standards.

The author of Clinical Cases and Images, responding to the study, offers tips for fellow medical bloggers such as "write as if your boss and patients are reading every day", "comply with HIPAA", "use a disclaimer", and "get your blog accredited by the Heath on the Net Foundation." Kevin, M.D., one of the most popular physician bloggers, also responded to the study, agreeing that "physician blogs that write about patients do need to be held to a higher than normal blog standard", but that physician blogs should not be required to disclose conflicts of interest nor be held to the same standard as medical journals. Ed Silverman, who blogs at Pharmalot, is bemused that doctors so frequently complain about not having enough time to see patients, but do manage to find time to blog about them. Dr. R.W. Donnell, who blogs at Trusted.MD, notes that there is still little consensus on whether medical bloggers should publish anonymously or not.

Can Health Bloggers Shape Health Policy?

The study also notes that medical blogs "can accurately portray the challenges facing our professions." But can they be harnessed to help find solutions to those challenges and to shape local, national, and even global health care policy?

This is the central question of a panel discussion on Tuesday, July 29 sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation. According to the blurb:

The briefing will highlight how the traditional health policy world has embraced blogging and will feature a keynote address by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, the first cabinet officer to author an official blog, followed by a moderated discussion with a variety of health policy bloggers and a media analyst.

According to the About Page of Secretary Mike Leavitt's blog, he is:

taking time to blog as a way to foster public discussion. The blog is the result of the Secretary’s continuing desire to engage Americans in the exchange of ideas on health care and the provision of human services. It provides an opportunity for the Secretary to share his observations as well as a means for him to have an open conversation about health and the related challenges that face the nation. The blog is intended to be a dynamic online conversation and the Secretary welcomes your ideas for overcoming those challenges.

Other health bloggers on the panel include Jacob Goldstein who blogs at the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog, John McDonough a senior adviser for Senator Edward Kennedy who blogs at Commonhealth and used to blog at A Healthy Blog, Michael Cannon who is the Cato Institute's director of health policy studies and frequent blogger, as well as Kaiser Family Foundation CEO Drew Altman who has so far published at least one blog post himself.

Global Voices for Global Health?

Other health-focused philanthropic foundations are also looking toward the blogosphere as a place to stimulate debate about health care policy. Last week I was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to help cover a conference they have organized about Global eHealth. (You can see my conference coverage here.) Rather than sticking to press releases fed to mainstream journalists, the conference organizers realized that bloggers could help reach new audiences and foster more interactive discussions around how technology can be used to improve health care in developing countries.

Similarly, the Health Media initiative of Open Society Institute's Public Health program has partnered with Rising Voices, the Knight News Challenge grantee which I direct, to train staff at six health-focused NGO's in the developing world how to use citizen media like blogs, podcasts, and online video to spread awareness about their work and the populations they work with.

We have hired Juhie Bhatia as Global Voices' public health editor to help filter and feature the content produced by these six NGO's as well as content from the greater health blogosphere worldwide. Already she has published a fascinating piece examining Indian bloggers' reactions to a controversial proposal in Maharashtra to make HIV testing compulsory before a couple is able to marry. Like so many posts on Global Voices, it is available in multiple languages including Bangla, French, Macedonian, and Hindi.

Whether a single blog can help influence health care policy in the United States or, for that matter, in Ukraine or Romania, remains to be seen. But it is undeniable that health-focused blogs have alredy become part of what the authors of the article from the Journal of General Internal Medicine refer to as "the literature and media of medicine." The ultimate goal, of course, is that more information and more discussion will eventually lead to better healthcare, better health policy, and healthier lives.